Leveraging Creativity to Teach Science: Incorporating Sketchnotes in Medical Laboratory Science Curriculum

ABSTRACT

Educators are always looking for ways to help students process and retain information. Visual notetaking, also known as Sketchnotes, is a creative and low-cost learning tool that can easily be integrated into science curriculum. The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine the effects of Sketchnotes on learning retention by first presenting information in the Sketchnotes style and then by allowing students to create their own visual notes in a clinical immunology course. The data gathered from this study indicate that students benefit from the use of visual notes either in a perceived method or from test scores. Quantitatively, the student cohort exposed to Sketchnotes performed better on 30 out of the 45 selected test questions, directly related to the Sketchnotes students created, compared with the student cohort that were not exposed to Sketchnotes. Furthermore, calculation of the percent of difference among each question revealed that—out of the 30 questions that the Sketchnote cohort performed better on—20 questions had a 10% difference or less, and 10 questions had a difference of 12%–40% between the cohorts. Qualitative-survey results revealed that most students experienced a perceived-learning benefit after creating and using Sketchnotes as study guides.