Сreating and processing sketchnotes: a psycholinguistic study

This paper presents the study of sketchnotes (visual notes containing a handwritten text and drawings) created by Russian school children. The study was aimed to reveal the subjective attitude of the children to the sketchnoting technique and to check whether the sketches are better than handwritten verbal summaries for retrieving and memorizing the information. In the first experiment, 139 participants aged from 14 to 17 years filled in a questionnaire aimed at figuring out their attitude to the sketchnoting. The results showed that the school children find this technique interesting and useful for memorizing and recalling the information, despite the fact that many of them report it to be time consuming. In the second experiment, we asked seven Russian speaking school children to retell two texts referring to the visual notes and text summary they had created themselves. The results of the experiment did not demonstrate the tendency for the sketchnotes to be processed faster and being more effective than the verbal text. We also described the patterns used by the school children while reading the sketchnotes and showed that they pay special attention to such elements of the sketchnotes as the title, highlighted elements and portraits.