Drawing as a strategy for children to learn ancient Chinese poetry

Drawing is regarded as a promising strategy for children's learning, which has greatly been supported by research using science texts as learning materials. To shed light on the benefit of drawing on children's text-based learning in humanities, two classes of 86 grade 5 children were required to learn an ancient Chinese poem in an actual classroom setting, either by drawing a visual picture illustrating the poem or by reading repeatedly at their own pace as usual. Data analyses were conducted using (generalized) linear mixed-effects models. The results indicated that children who were allowed to generate a drawing during learning showed better learning performance of the entire poem than children who were allowed to read repeatedly regarding the delayed posttest rather than the immediate posttest. Besides, children in the drawing group reported a higher level of learning motivation than those in the reading group. We argue that the generative drawing effect can be tentatively extended to ancient Chinese poetry education.