ArtPlantae Today

How has drawing been used as a learning tool in the classroom?

After reviewing 100 years of literature about children and drawing, Boston College faculty Walt Haney, Michael Russell and Damian Bebell discuss their findings in Drawing on Education: Using Drawings to Document Schooling and Support Change.

Haney et al. (2004) observed the following patterns about scholarly work addressing drawing in the classroom:

1. Most of the literature addresses the psychological analysis of children’s drawings with respect to cognitive development or emotional issues.
2. Most of the literature is about young children instead of older children.
3. Drawing in large research projects is a recent development.
4. Drawings are seldom used in research projects concerning education.

Haney et al. (2004) include their own research in their review and propose that student drawings can also be used to investigate classroom environments and school life. They found that asking students to draw their teacher at work reveals a lot about what goes on inside the classroom.

The authors began their research in 1994 and, after pilot-testing several prompts, included the following prompt in their initial study:

Think about the teachers and the kinds of things you do in your classrooms. Draw a picture of one of your teachers working in his or her classroom.

From this initial study, Haney et al. (2004) went on to develop prompts encouraging students to document educational phenomena. Students documented phenomena such as what they do when they read and what they do when they learn math. Examples of other prompts used in their research and a lengthy explanation of how Haney et al. (2004) evaluated student drawings can be found in their paper.

How can the work of Haney, Russell and Bebell be applied to classroom research addressing plant-based education?

Take a quiet afternoon to read and digest Haney et al. (2004) and come back here to share your thoughts. This article is available online from
Harvard Educational Review for $9.95.

You can also look for this article at your local college library.

Literature Cited
Haney, Walt and Michael Russell, Damian Bebell. 2004. Drawing on education: Using drawings to document schooling and support change. Harvard Educational Review. 74(3): 241-272.

Are you interested in how drawing can be used in a biology classroom?
Join the conversation with this month’s featured guest, Jennifer Landin.

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We learn from Dr. Dale J. Cohen again this week.

This time we learn about the experiments he designed to investigate the relationship between drawing accuracy and how artists look at a subject. In Look Little, Look Often: The Influence of Gaze Frequency on Drawing Accuracy, Cohen presents interesting information about how artists glance between a subject and their drawing.

Let’s begin by defining gaze frequency.

Dr. Cohen defines gaze frequency as “the rate at which artists glance between their drawing and the stimulus” (Cohen, 2005). What Cohen calls the “stimulus” in his experiments, I will refer to as the “subject” here. While stimulus is the more appropriate term to use, it would be confusing to use the term in this review without you having read Cohen’s review of drawing accuracy, stimulus interpretation and how stimulus interpretation can influence accuracy and the way marks are made on paper. Since his stimuli are what we would call subjects, I will refer to them in this way.

In Look Little, Look Often, Cohen (2005) describes four experiments conducted at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Once again, some students participated as “artists” (i.e., they completed assigned rendering tasks), while others participated as “critics” who rated the accuracy of drawings produced by those in the artist group.

In his first experiment, Cohen (2005) investigated if there was a correlation between gaze frequency and drawing accuracy. Artists (both art majors and nonart majors) were shown two color photographs — portraits of males seen from the shoulders up (Cohen, 2005). The photos were placed about 51 cm to the right of the participant and at a 45 degree angle, as this allowed the video recorder to record the artist and how they worked (Cohen, 2005). The video recorder was positioned in front of the artist and was placed in a doorway of an adjoining room behind a curtain with a hole cut out for the camera lens (Cohen, 2005). Artists were given 10 minutes to work on the photographs (Cohen, 2005). The video recordings were viewed by a coder who coded eye movements using a software program written by Cohen. Gaze frequency, the number of times an artist switched their gaze “from the photo to the drawing and back again per second” was measured in Hertz (Cohen, 2005).

Data collected in Experiment 1 demonstrated that a positive relationship exists between gaze frequency and accuracy rating. That is, the higher the gaze frequency, the higher the accuracy rating.

Experiments 2,3 and 4 further explored the findings of Experiment 1. In these experiments, gaze frequency was manipulated. Here is a very quick look at these experiments and the results of each.

Experiment 2
Research Question: Does gaze frequency influence drawing ability?
Findings: Gaze frequency influences drawing accuracy only for trained artists. Cohen (2005) found that decreasing the gaze frequencies of trained artists decreased the accuracy of their drawings.


Experiment 3
Cohen (2005) repeated Experiment 2. This time, though, he increased the gazing times because it appeared that the times set in Experiment 2 were too fast for non-artists. In this experiment, gaze frequency was “constant across artistic training levels” (Cohen, 2005). Results indicated that gaze frequency can inhibit artist drawing accuracy.


Experiment 4
Cohen (2005) repeated Experiment 3. This time there were only two gaze frequency periods. One was 3 seconds and the other 10 minutes. Because of observations observed in Experiment 1 (see Cohen’s paper), it was hypothesized that the drawings created during the 3-second gazing period would be less accurate than the 10-minute period. Data from this experiment indicated that gaze frequency inhibits drawing accuracy (Cohen, 2005). Raters rated the drawings rendered at 3 seconds to be less accurate than those rendered at 10 minutes — a time period in which artists could look at the subject and their drawing at will and not in response to an experimental stimulus (Cohen, 2005). It was also observed that trained artists switched their gaze more often than non-artists (Cohen, 2005).

The summaries above are brief and don’t do Cohen’s experiments justice. To truly understand his methods, his results, and how his assessment of 130 artists demonstrates that higher gaze frequencies result in more accurate drawings, read Cohen (2005). His article is available online on the website of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Literature Cited
Cohen, Dale J. 2005. Look little, look often: The influence of gaze frequency on drawing accuracy. Perception & Psychophysics. 67(6): 997-1009. Web. http://people.uncw.edu/cohend/research/papers/Cohen%202005.pdf
[accessed 11 September 2013]

Gaze frequency and drawing plants. What have you noticed?
Share your comments below.

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