The impact of drawing and handwriting diagrams and problems as opposed to presenting them via static images is another popular topic in the science of learning. Salman Khan popularized this delivery method in his successful Khan Academy videos. Generally, the advice is to draw things out, though there is debate as to whether the presence of the drawer’s hand in the video is helpful or not.
Guo and colleagues (2014) found that students in four edX MOOCs on STEM topics were more engaged by Khan-style tutorial videos than videos with PowerPoints and screencasts alone. Fiorella and Mayer (2016) found that students who watched the instructor draw diagrams on the Doppler effect outperformed those who viewed already drawn diagrams. And Fiorella and colleagues in 2019 showed that college students who watched the instructor hand draw diagrams of the human kidney outperformed those who learned from static drawings. They performed even better when the drawings were done on a transparent whiteboard so that the instructor could better maintain eye contact. While the hand itself can act as a cueing device to guide the learner’s attention, research offers mixed results on whether its presence has a positive or no effect on learning (Fiorella, Stull, Kuhlmann, & Mayer, 2019; Fiorella & Mayer, 2016; Schmidgall, Eitel, & Scheiter, 2018).
So, if you’re teaching students how to do a math problem, or explaining an anatomical system or process that requires a diagram, consider hand drawing it out rather than presenting it in static images on slides. Using a touchscreen device like a tablet with a stylus can be an easy way to do this. Videoconferencing software like Zoom also offer whiteboard features, though it can be harder to draw accurately with a mouse or computer trackpad.
Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528-546. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065
Fiorella, L., Stull, A. T., Kuhlmann, S., & Mayer, R. E. (2019). Instructor presence in video lectures: The role of dynamic drawings, eye contact, and instructor visibility. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(7), 1162–1171. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000325
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference (L@S ’14). https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239
Schmidgall, S. P., Eitel, A., & Scheiter, K. (2019). Why do learners who draw perform well? Investigating the role of visualization, generation and externalization in learner-generated drawing. Learning and Instruction, 60, 138-153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2018.01.006