How Doodles Facilitate Learning: Attention, Retention, and Comprehension

Abstract

Psychology and neuroscience findings show positive correlation between doodling as a learning tactic and memory retention as a result. This appears antithetical to what has been assumed to be true – doodlers are those absent-minded during class. The aforementioned discrepancy kindles my interest in exploring whether and how doodles worked to undergraduate attendees, so this paper, inspired by Sunni Brown, an American author well-known for her promotion of doodles as a creative way to learn, is intended to explore whether and how doodles worked to undergraduate attendees. The subjects in question, most of whom were English majors whose mother tongue was Mandarin, signed up for a class where English was used as the medium of instruction. They were required to apply icons, charts, graphs, and sketches to note-taking. I often played it by ear on doodle demonstration to the subjects; when necessary, I acted as a partner ready to share advice on their request. A semester-end survey consisting of 20 items (response rate = 94%) was conducted to see whether teacher’s guidance helped, how doodling facilitated learning in a classroom learning setting, and whether the subjects became susceptible to doodling when such variables as oral expressions and division of labor were taken into account. The results disclose that doodles pan out well for learners in these categories: deep thinking, attention retention, memory retention, takeaways scanning, conclusion drawing, linearity sensing, idea creation, causation comprehension, and status-quo subversion. What remains to be questioned includes unbound doodles and compulsory teamwork.

Keywords: pedagogy, InfoDoodle, learner autonomy, classroom management