![]() Even when the material they’re covering is deeply personal. What’s interesting to me is that the authors that write their memoirs for kids tend to do so ONLY for kids. There are exceptions to this (Rosa Parks, for example) but generally speaking that’s the long and short of the matter. That is usually because folks in other professions don’t care about promoting themselves to kids or, if they do, it’s for the wrong reasons. What you won’t find are autobiographies by much of any other profession. So it is that you’ll find autobios by folks like Jean Fritz, Jon Scieszka, Ed Young, Jerry Spinelli, Ether Hautzig, and others. The catch? Well, it appears that the only people who tend to do this are children’s authors themselves. Which is to say, more and more people are writing their autobiographies for the younger reading set. ![]() Wammes and his team are currently trying to determine why this memory benefit is so potent, and how widely it can be applied to other types of information.I am happy to report that there has been an uptick in options for those children handed the standard “You Must Read an Autobiography” assignment in school. While the drawing effect proved reliable in testing, the experiments were conducted with single words only. In line with this, we showed that people still gained a huge advantage in later memory, even when they had just 4 seconds to draw their picture," said Wammes. ![]() ![]() "Importantly, the quality of the drawings people made did not seem to matter, suggesting that everyone could benefit from this memory strategy, regardless of their artistic talent. Drawing led to better later memory performance than listing physical characteristics, creating mental images, and viewing pictures of the objects depicted by the words. Memory for drawn words was superior to all other alternatives. In variations of the experiment in which students drew the words repeatedly, or added visual details to the written letters, such as shading or other doodles, the results remained unchanged. We labelled this benefit 'the drawing effect,' which refers to this distinct advantage of drawing words relative to writing them out." "Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn than written words. ![]() "We discovered a significant recall advantage for words that were drawn as compared to those that were written," said Wammes. The study appeared in the the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Finally, the researchers asked students to freely recall as many words as possible from the initial list in just 60 seconds. They were then given a filler task of classifying musical tones to facilitate the retention process. The study, by Wammes, along with fellow PhD candidate Melissa Meade and Professor Myra Fernandes, presented student participants with a list of simple, easily drawn words, such as "apple." The students were given 40 seconds to either draw the word, or write it out repeatedly. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic information." "We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always came out on top," said the study's lead author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. ![]()
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