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Archive for the ‘teaching & learning’ Category

A Guide to Biological Illustration

Posted in scientific illustration, teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on November 23, 2012|

Pen and ink illustrations of plants are found most often in field guides. They convey a great deal of information and are attractive works of art, even though being a “work of art” might not be their primary purpose.

Learning how to draw in pen and ink can be a challenge. Figuring out how to make marks in the proper order to create the intended effect takes some thought. After all, ink is so, so …… permanent.

One can easily find a nice selection of instructional books about working in pen and ink. Resources dedicated to drawing in the sciences, however, are a little more difficult to find but they are out there. Take for example Biological Illustration: A Guide to Drawing for Reproduction by Claire Dalby and D. H. Dalby.

This 14-page paper is a helpful introduction to drawing in pen and ink. Don’t let its age (32 years) cause you to doubt the value of the information it has. While today there may be more convenient pen and ink tools at our disposal, not to mention technologically nifty ways of creating pen and ink-like drawings with apps, nothing beats learning from people with years of experience behind them.

In their paper, Dalby & Dalby (1980) address many interesting topics. Topics such as creating diagrammatic and naturalistic images, working from dried or preserved material, and reproducing line drawings for publication. They include in their paper a 9-page guide to drawing in black and white where they discuss: dots, lines and tones; pure line drawing; tone; dots; hatching; artificial tones and tints; pens; pencils; brushes; paper; spare paper; ink; white paint; light boxes and tracing tables; linen testers and proportional dividers. I think you will find the section about hatching of particular interest. In this section, Dalby & Dalby (1980) present the fruit of the opium poppy drawn seven different ways. Here you can learn how line drawing, stippling, hatching and a combination of dots and lines can affect the appearance of a specimen.

I think you will also enjoy the troubleshooting section in which they address drawing challenges. Here Dalby & Dalby (1980) offer suggestions about how to create smooth surfaces, thin subjects, hairy subjects, small subjects, complicated subjects with too much detail, colored subjects, spirals, and intricate symmetrical subjects.

Another helpful section is the one in which the authors address printing techniques and their limitations. In this section, they provide invaluable insight that will help you plan line drawings for publication.

This paper is a wonderful addition to any drawing library. It is available online for free from the Field Studies Council. Click on the link below and scroll down to Volume 5, Number 2.


Literature Cited
Dalby, Claire and D.H. Dalby. 1980. Biological illustration: A guide to drawing for reproduction. Field Studies 5(2):307-321. Web. <http://www.field-studies-council.org/fieldstudies/date.htm> [accessed 20 November 2012]


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Quick & Easy Lesson in Observation

Posted in botanical art, teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on November 9, 2012|

How do you teach your students the importance of making detailed observations?

Do you use a single leaf? Leaves arranged along a stem? A single flower?

How long does it take you to make your point? To explain foreshortening?

Here is an activity to consider when the only message you want to get across is “look closely”.

In A Lemon of a Lesson, professor James Minogue shares how he uses lemons to teach elementary school students (grades 3-6) and his preservice teachers the value of looking closely. While lemons may appear to be only balls at first glance, Minogue (2008) demonstrates that they provide ample opportunity for students to make insightful observations, take measurements and even use a magnifying glass.

Minogue’s lesson in observation is comprised of six simple steps. They are:

  1. Choose a lemon from the bowl. Observe your lemon, record observations using words and a sketch.
  2. Take measurements using measuring tape and study your lemon using a magnifying lens. Record your observations.
  3. Return lemons to the bowl.
    (Note: After lemons have been returned, Minogue redistributes lemons to other areas of the classroom.)
  4. Look for your own lemon using the detailed and descriptive data you recorded.
  5. Look for a classmate’s lemon using their data. Discuss your selection with your classmate.
  6. Complete the post-activity worksheet.

Minogue (2008) conducts a post-activity discussion with students in which they share what made the search for a specific lemon easy and what made it difficult. He says during this discussion, students are quick to realize that “accurate measurements, careful sketches, and attention to distinguishing features” (Minogue, 2008) are key to making accurate observations.

Why does this lemon lesson work? Minogue (2008) explains this lesson is effective because when you ask students to study familiar objects, this opens their minds to new ways of seeing.

I am sure you already see how this activity can be applied to lessons about plant morphology and botanical art.

The worksheets Minogue uses in his activity are included with his paper. You can buy Minogue (2008) for 99¢ from the journal Science and Children.


Literature Cited
Minogue, James. 2008. A lemon of a lesson. Science and Children.
45(6): 25-27.

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No, Can’t, Don’t

Posted in drawing, teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on November 2, 2012|

When ArtPlantae participates in educational events, garden shows and other venues, I bring a traveling Guest Sketchbook with me and a sign that reads, “Please doodle in the Guest Sketchbook. Chicken scratch preferred. Words not necessary. Select any page. Thank you.”

All day long I invite people to doodle. Adults are the first to shake their heads no and to walk away. The usual response is “No. I can’t draw and I don’t doodle.” One man said, “Oh no. Not without a straightedge!”

The response I receive from children is very different. They are all over the sketchbook. Some return to draw again. Others lose track of time and space and draw for a long time. While most children respond in a positive way to my invitation, there have been some who have politely declined.

At an outdoor event where everyone is out enjoying a sunny day, having my invitation turned down is no big deal.

But what if you were using drawing as a learning tool for specific reasons and had a room full of students who groaned at the thought of having to draw for an assignment? What do you do then?

In Drawing Out the Artist in Science Students, science teacher Al Camacho, mechanical engineering professor Gary Benenson and Patricia Rosas-Colin, a graduate student in mathematics education have an answer to this dilemma. Their answer is quite simply, teach these students how to draw.

Not in an assertive “Draw or else!” sort of way, of course. But in a way that encourages them to become visual thinkers.

In their paper, the authors present five exercises designed to make students thoughtful and inquiring observers. Here I provide only a one-line description of each exercise. For all the juicy details, please see their paper.

In Camacho et al. (2012), you’ll find exercises about:

  • Sci-a-grams: What are they and how they can be used to demonstrate the value of simple sketches.
  • Basic Shapes – How to see shapes in everyday objects
  • Creating with Basic Shapes – How to create representational images
  • Information Through Labels – An exercise in communicating information
  • Diagram Design – An exercise in explaining how things work

You will also find in this paper a scoring rubric teachers can use to evaluate student drawings and assess student understanding.

The exercises presented in this paper do more than help students use drawing as a learning tool. They train students how to communicate information visually and equip students with a new way of thinking and expressing ideas (Camacho et al., 2012).

To obtain a copy of Camacho et al. (2012), you can buy this article online from the National Science Teachers Association (99¢).


Literature Cited
Camacho, Al and Gary Benenson, Carmen Patricia Rosas-Colin. 2012. Drawing out the artist in science students. Science and Children. 50(3): 68-73.

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College Students’ Knowledge of Plants

Posted in teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on October 19, 2012|

We have seen how experiences in informal botany education can improve the plant recognition skills in children. Today we take a look at how plants fare in the minds of college students.

In Botanical Knowledge of a Group of College Students in South Carolina USA, Gail E. Wagner evaluates student knowledge of crop plants, trees, flowers, weeds, vines and grasses.

Wagner’s sample population consisted of thirty-one 18-22 year-old college students. Sixteen interviewers helped Wagner conduct this study. Each interviewed two students. The students who were interviewed were selected by the interviewers themselves. Both the interviewers and the interviewees were undergraduate students at the University of South Carolina. The interviewers were enrolled in an ethnobotany course.

During this study, students were asked to create a list of plants for each of the categories mentioned earlier. Wagner (2008) marked entries as being “correct”, “wrong”, or “inappropriate”. Incorrect entries were plants listed in the wrong categories or were listed using general terms. Entries marked “inappropriate” were entries that were placed in the correct category, but did not meet other criteria outlined by the interviewers (such as plants growing outside of South Carolina) (Wagner, 2008).

Student responses were entered into a software program used for consensus analysis (see Wagner’s paper for details). Data analysis revealed:

  • Students were more familiar with crops, trees and garden flowers than vines, weeds and grasses.
  • 77% of students could identify local crops correctly
  • 50% of students could list at least one wildflower or weed correctly (“dandelion” was listed most often)
  • 35% of students could not list a grass. One of the students surveyed remarked, “I didn’t know there were different kinds of grasses” (Wagner, 2008)
  • 19% of students could not list a vine
  • 4% of students could not list a wildflower or weed

Wagner (2008) found that students could provide the most detailed plant lists for categories with which they were most familiar. She explains she is not surprised by students’ ability to correctly identify more crops, trees and wildflowers given the well-established fact that children in industrialized countries interact with plants less frequently, are exposed to many non-native plant species through urbanized landscaping, and “that most local flora is viewed from the window of a vehicle” (Wagner, 2008).

Gail E. Wagner’s paper is much more than an analysis of botanical knowledge. It provides interesting insights into sources of knowledge and how people categorize information. Wagner (2008) provides an interesting discussion about “direct”, “indirect” and “vicarious” knowledge. Citing research about how children experience nature, she explains that indirect knowledge comes from direct interaction with plants, that indirect knowledge comes from guided interactions (such as what can be found at botanical gardens), and that vicarious knowledge is the kind of knowledge one might acquire while surfing the Web or watching television.

To learn more about these topics and Wagner’s thoughts about designing studies to evaluate botanical knowledge, download a copy of her article by clicking on the link below. The article is free to download. The journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications is published online. Its contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.


Literature Cited

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Drawings Reveal How Teachers View the Environment

Posted in drawing, environmental education, teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on September 21, 2012|

Instead of exploring drawing and learning as it applies to young learners, today we’re looking at drawing, learning and teachers.

How teachers view the environment influences how they make meaning about it. To investigate how teachers view the world around them, Christine Moseley, Blanche Desjean-Perrotta and Julianna Utley field-tested a scoring rubric assessing teachers’ perceptions of the environment as revealed through their drawings. Their findings are discussed in The Draw-An-Environment Test Rubric (DAET-R), Exploring Pre-Service Teachers’ Mental Models of the Environment.

Drawings have been used as a research tool for many years because they provide insight into an individual’s beliefs and how they make meaning about the world around them (Moseley et al., 2010). Because there has been little research into teachers’ mental images of the environment and how these images influence how teachers think about the environment, Moseley et al. (2010) made this the focus of their research.

To make it easier to quantitatively assess teachers’ mental images as revealed through their drawings, Moseley et al. (2010) created a rubric that enabled them to assign a score to specific elements (or “factors”) in a drawing. The rubric they designed was used to evaluate pre-service teachers’ replies to two prompts in the Draw-An-Environment Test (DAET). Teachers were instructed to draw a picture of what they thought the environment was and then were asked to provide a written definition for the environment. The two prompts pre-service teachers responded to were “My drawing of the environment is ___” and “My definition of the environment is ___”.

Moseley et al. (2010) designed this study to address two research questions:

  1. Is the Draw-An-Environment Test Rubric a valid assessment tool?
  2. What mental models (i.e., images) do early childhood pre-service teachers have of the environment?

The quick answer to their first research question is, “yes”. The rubric they created is a valid and reliable assessment tool. A thorough statistical analysis of the DAET-R can be found in their paper.

As for their findings regarding their second research question…

One hundred eighteen pre-K to fourth grade pre-service teachers (average age 26.9 years) participated in this study. The participants were enrolled in senior level science and math courses.

The drawing portion of the DAET was evaluated using the DAET-R. The evaluation focused on “the degree of evidence in the drawings of interactions” (Moseley et al., 2010). Scores were assigned if a factor was present, if a factor was not present, if a factor interacted with other factors and if two or more factors interacted with each other (Moseley et al., 2010). The research team assigned “degrees of evidence” using a scoring system of 0-3 points, with the highest point score assigned to drawings in which “the participant was trying to indicate an interaction among factors with an emphasis on a systems approach to the definition of environment” (Moseley et al., 2010).

The drawings they received revealed that the pre-service teachers do not consider humans to be an integral part of the environment. Sixty percent of the participants completing the DAET did not draw humans in their pictures and only 31% drew humans interacting with the environment in some way (Moseley et al., 2010). The drawings also revealed the pre-service teachers’ lack of understanding about interactions occurring between factors in the environment (Moseley et al., 2010). Participants included many factors in their drawings and while they labeled them with identification labels such as “cat” or “tree”, they did not assign conceptual labels like “pollination” or “growth” (Moseley et al., 2010). Only two of the 118 drawings scored represented an understanding of how systems are dependent upon each other in the natural environment (Moseley et al., 2010).

The research team observed several drawings of homes, bedrooms, schools, classrooms and urban neighborhoods — scenes suggesting to Moseley et al., 2010 that the word environment did not bring forth images of nature in the minds of their participants. Citing the work of several other studies, Moseley et al. (2010) concluded that their sample population of pre-service teachers had an “object view” of the environment instead of a view in which humans interacted with the environment.

Before I continue, I need to point out that, prior to participants completing the DAET, Moseley et al. (2010) asked participants about their “residential experiences” (i.e., where they have lived for most of their lives). They found out that 21% of their sample population had lived in a rural environment, 32% in an urban environment, and 46% in a suburban environment. It should also be pointed out that prior to their participation in this study, the pre-service teachers had not received any training in environmental education (Moseley et al., 2010).

The results of the drawing section of the DAET are consistent with the results observed in the written section of the test, an evaluation that Moseley et al. (2010) described in a separate paper. The research team evaluated the drawing and written portions of the DAET separately so that the DAET-R could be evaluated for its validity as an assessment tool.

The results of their study prompted Moseley et al. (2010) to call for teacher education programs “that support pre-service teachers’ development of a conceptual model of the environment that integrates humans and the abiotic and biotic factors within the environment” as this would better prepare teachers to teach children about organisms, the environment, and biodiversity.

Read more about the research team’s recommendations and see how they used the DAET-R to evaluate drawings. Purchase a copy of this paper online or
search for this article at your local college library. A copy of the DAET and the DAET-R are included in this paper.


Literature Cited
Moseley, Christine, Blanche Desjean-Perrotta and Julianna Utley. 2010. The Draw-An-Environment Test Rubric (DAET-R): exploring pre-service teachers’ mental models of the environment. Environmental Education Research.
16(2): 189-208.


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Scientific Illustration in Kindergarten

Posted in drawing, teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on September 7, 2012|

Conversations about natural science illustration usually occur among adults interested in a broad range of topics pertaining to the fields of art and science.

However, younger audiences can also be found to engage in similar conversation. Take for example, the students of Kathryn Kaatz. A kindergarten teacher in Minnesota, Kaatz begins each school year with an activity that trains students to become observant science artists. Kaatz describes this activity in A Walk in the Tall, Tall Grass.

Early in the school year, Kaatz (2008) reads In the Tall, Tall Grass by Denise Fleming to introduce students to the plants and animals living in meadows and grasslands. This introduction is followed by a field trip to a reclaimed prairie. The objective of this field trip is to do more than look for the plants and animals students learned about in the book. The objective is to prepare students to become thoughtful observers and scientific illustrators.

During their field trip, students look at the types of grasses growing in the prairie, inspect seed heads, and identify grass species by using the photographic field guide Kaatz (2008) created for parent volunteers. While in the field, Kaatz (2008) makes it a point not spend too much time telling students what to observe and how to observe. She says she is more interested in letting students make their own discoveries.

Back in the classroom, however, Kaatz (2008) carefully guides students when they sit down to observe grass plants in more detail. Her thoughtful and methodical approach to enhancing student observation skills begins with a reading of
What is a scientist? by Barbara Lehn and by emphasizing something of great importance that all scientists do — draw what they see. Aspiring to make students more thoughtful observers and recorders of information, Kaatz (2008) takes the time to discuss with students the differences between scientific drawing and artistic drawing. She then sits down with a vase of grass specimens and models how to observe and how to draw the grass specimens she brought into the classroom. In her article, Kaatz (2008) shares how she talks to herself during her demonstration. Kaatz (2008) says she says things like:

Hmmm….I can see the stem goes all the way to the bottom of the vase, so I guess I’ll make a line like this.

Oops, (the lines) aren’t so straight but I guess that’s O.K. When I look at the grass, I see things in nature aren’t perfect either.

Upon concluding her demonstration, Kaatz (2008) presents her scientific drawing to her students. She then instructs students to draw at least three different grass specimens and reminds students that scientists only draw what they see.

Having taught this activity for several years, Kaatz (2008) says she is always pleased with how seriously students observe the grass specimens and how thoughtfully they compose their scientific drawings. By showing students how to observe and how to create scientific drawings early in the year, Kaatz’s students are prepared to “draw as scientists” (Kaatz, 2008) all year long.

Learn more about how Kathyrn Kaatz teaches this activity in her classroom by buying a copy of her article online for 99¢ at the NSTA Learning Center.


Literature Cited

Kaatz, Kathryn. 2008. A Walk in the Tall, Tall Grass. Science and Children. 45(6): 28-31.

(Update June 26, 2024: The NSTA no longer sells this article. Membership is required.)


Also See
Making Connections and Inspiring Action to Preserve America’s Prairies

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Mapping the Trees of Central Park

Posted in teaching & learning, Teaching & Learning on August 24, 2012|

Today I want to follow-up last week’s article about art and botany needing each other, with an example of how the disciplines of art and botany can work together to change the way people experience a local park.

When artist and art director, Ken Chaya, was asked to make a map about the trees and landscapes of Central Park, little did he know he was about to become a botanist, an experienced hiker, and become intimately familiar with every square foot of New York’s famous park.

Over a two-year period, Chaya learned how to identify trees, created symbols for every major tree species, walked more than 500 miles, and represented 19,630 trees on a single sheet of paper to create the most accurate and detailed map ever published about Central Park.

Chaya tells his story at CentralParkNature and provides a behind-the-scenes look at how he created Central Park Entire, The Definitive Illustrated Map.

In six short documentary-style videos, Chaya explains how he learned to identify 172 species of trees, how he mapped every path in the park, and what he learned while creating the illustrations for his map.

Here is a great example of art and botany in action!

Chaya’s map is available as a wall poster ($35) and as a folded map ($12.95). Quantity discounts are available.


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