In our paper we address the following questions (1) What are the effects of student-generated versus presented drawings on the understanding of colligatory history concepts? (2) Do these effects differ for students with a different level of prior knowledge? (3) Does the quality of student-generated drawings differ for students with a different level of prior knowledge?

The students that participated in the study were from one secondary school preparing for higher vocational education and university. Forty-eight students were from two first-year classes (students aged 12 to 13) with the same teacher and fifty-seven students were from two second-year classes (students aged 13 to 14), with another teacher. The task was about the Fall of the Roman Empire. Students from the first year did not get any instruction yet about the Fall of the Roman Empire. We expected these students to have low prior knowledge. Students in the second year finished a lesson about the fall of the empire, about a year ago. We expected that these students would have high prior knowledge. We used pre-test scores (low, intermediate and high) to assign pupils at random within each class to one of the two conditions: Presented or Drawing. In the Presented condition students were provided with a text about the Fall of the Roman Empire (one page), illustrated with five drawings. The students got questions that could only be answered by information from both the text and the pictures. In the Drawing condition students were provided with the same text, but without illustrations. We asked them to construct three drawings (one for each section of the text) that together would give an accurate representation of the Fall of the Roman Empire.

We administered an Identification (right/wrong questions) and an Application (open answer) test as a pre- and post-test. Because of low homogeneity (Cronbach’s alpha) for the Identification test, we decided to include only the Application test in our analyses. In one history lesson (50 minutes), students completed the task and an evaluation questionnaire.

Our expectation that students from year 2 would have more prior knowledge was confirmed. Students from Year 2 scored significantly higher on the pre-test than students from Year 1. In both conditions students improved significantly from the pre-test to the post-test. An Ancova showed a significant main effect of both Task and Prior knowledge and an interaction effect between Task and Prior knowledge. Students in the Drawing condition scored higher on the post-test than students in the Presented condition. High prior knowledge students scored higher on the post-test than Low prior knowledge students. Drawing appeared to be more effective for students with little prior knowledge, than for students with a reasonable amount of prior knowledge.

We did not find signficant differences for the quality of the student-generated drawings between High and Low prior knowledge students. Both groups were able to draw the colligatory concept Fall of the West Roman Empire and combined both abstract and concrete information elements presented in the text. Part of the students, however, had difficulties with depicting the core information presented in the text as a whole.

The results support the idea that student-generated drawing can be a powerful strategy to learn colligatory history concepts. Furthermore, it seems that prior knowledge does affect the learning outcomes. Probably, drawing is more beneficial to students with less prior knowledge, because these students find it more difficult to comprehend the text and are less familiar with the topic (see also Peeck, 1993). There is more need for them to process the content of the text in order to be able to construct a nonverbal representation. The students with more prior knowledge may have acces to more constructive resources. These students have already seen pictures representing events and phenomena related to the Fall of the Roman Empire, and therefore deep processing of the text is less needed to make a drawing.

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Van Meter, P., & Garner, J. (2005). The promise and practice of learner-generated drawing: literature review and synthesis. Educational Psychology Review, 17 (4), 285-325.