Drawing on Education

What are the benefits to using children's drawings to do classroom research?

Children's drawings can provide insight as to what instruction and learning actually occurs within the classroom. Drawings can also be used to assess how the student feels about the subject and/or the teacher. 

Whereas children are not likely to write a synopsis of their feelings toward a class, they are much more apt to draw a picture of their emotions. Not only do drawings provide researchers with the resources to gauge students' feelings, but they also give rise to the students' overall perceptions of the classroom. 

I particularly enjoyed the section in the article Drawing on Education on student drawings of standardized testing. Researchers and educational policymakers aren't particularly aware of students' negative feelings and emotions toward standardized testing, and drawings have offered a glimpse into their mind. 

What have we learned about teaching and learning from children's drawings?

Through drawings, we have learned that teaching can be extremely teacher-directed. An example drawing from the article demonstrated a teacher standing in the front of the class while they lectured to students that were seated in rows. This type of drawing depicts the traditional teacher-student relationship in which the teacher lectures and the students listen and take notes.

What methods can be used to code drawings reliably?

In order to reliably code drawings, you can begin by reviewing the drawings and creating a checklist that documents the specific features found in the drawings. For instance, if you were to ask students to draw a picture of how technology is used in their classroom, you could use trait coding and number--

0-no technology present

1-technology only used in latter part of instruction 

2-technology present throughout the teaching and learning process

Holistic coding can also be used, which assigns a point scale based on the overall judgment of how the situation is depicted. The article Drawing on Education referenced drawings of classrooms that have been rated on whether they were depicted positively or negatively. 

Lastly, holistic review is used with a group of teachers that seeks to identify patterns, why these patterns occur, and what changes could be made in your school as a result of these drawings. This type of coding incorporates both analytical and holistic coding. 

What evidence is there of the reliability and validity of using drawings to make inferences about teaching and learning?

Reliability of using drawings is equated to the test/re-test use of other studies. The reliability of using drawings is enhanced by using coding to determine various inferences about aspects of education. Reliability of drawings is also distinguished by stability. This concept refers to the extent to which assessment results are stable over time. Stability of drawings can be determined by using trait-coding features.

Validity studies have been conducted by observing what teachers can learn from using drawings to improve their teaching and classroom practices. Oftentimes, children's drawings along with other types of quantitative data (i.e. student assessment scores) can provide elicited information about similar characteristics, and thus a direct correlation is observed. 

In what contexts have drawings supported change?

Children's drawings have supported change within the classroom by providing the opportunity for teachers to engage in reflection. Seeing their classroom through the eyes of the students is a powerful tool-as it enables teachers to reflect on their own teaching and instruction.

Drawings have purportedly been extremely influential in documenting the educational ecology of classrooms and schools. They can demonstrate teaching attitudes and styles, student-teacher relationship, technology integration, and the overall learning atmosphere. 

Write a prompt designed to elicit drawings from children in an after school program focused on STEM education that would help us understand change in student thinking about how technology can be used to solve problems.

-I definitely need some help refining these prompts, but I think I have a decent start. Here are several prompts that I came up with that would elicit distinctly different picture drawings ad responses. I would be extremely interested to see the differences between technology use to solve problems at home versus at school. 

• Draw a picture of how you would use a computer to solve problems at school.
• Draw a picture of how you would use technology to solve problems at home.
• Draw a picture of how you would use technology to solve problems in the world.
• Draw a picture of somebody using a computer to help save the environment.