When Can Making a Drawing Hinder Problem Solving? Effect of the Drawing Strategy on Linear Overgeneralizations and Problem Solving

The strategy of making a drawing has been claimed to facilitate mathematical problem solving. However, De Bock et al. (2003) surprisingly found that drawing negatively affected performance in solving non-linear geometry problems, in which the area or volume of similar figures or solids had to be determined by a given scaling factor. The authors suggested that making a drawing increased the number of overgeneralizations and negatively affected students’ performance. Our study involves a partial replication and also an important validation and extension of this study by addressing two factors: low-quality drawing strategy and poor visual monitoring, both of which might explain the negative effect of drawing. First, we expected that improving the quality of the drawing strategy by prompting students to highlight important information in their drawings would diminish the negative effect of the drawing strategy. Second, we expected that fostering visual monitoring while drawing, by offering problems with small scaling factors, would diminish the negative effect of the drawing strategy. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 180 students (ninth- to eleventh-graders) to investigate the effects of drawing and visual monitoring on solving non-linear geometry problems. Our results replicated the previous finding that drawing negatively affects performance. We confirmed that linear overgeneralizations are a prevalent reason for this finding. Elaborating on previous findings revealed that the quality of the drawing strategy but not visual monitoring was responsible for the effect of the drawing strategy on linear overgeneralizations. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of students’ awareness of linear overgeneralizations indicated that improving the quality of drawing strategy and enhancing visual monitoring did not lead to a greater awareness of the mistakes learners made because of linear overgeneralizations. We conclude that the way the drawing strategy is used determines whether it is useful or damaging, and more efforts are essential to enable students to apply it appropriately.