Doodles

Overview

Objectives/Goals To determine if doodling could help a person improve their attention level while listening to a classroom lesson. Methods/Materials For this study, the materials that were used was a documentary movie,an audio book, comprehension tests, and a rating scale to measure the levels of attention of the students. Students from two different classes were asked to watch 20 minutes of a documentary. The first class was asked to doodled while watching the movie but the second class was not allowed to doodle. A comprehension test was given at the conclusion of the movie and the students were asked to rate their levels of attention on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the highest level of attention. The next day, the same two classes watched the next 20 minutes of the movie, but this time the second class was asked to doodle but not the first. Another comprehension test was given and the students were again asked to rate their levels of attention. The study was then futhered by having the experiment repeated using an audio book. Results The data determined that 50% students who doodled while watching the documentary increased their attention levels as well as scored 63% better on the test. The data using the audio book were simular. 58% of the students had increased attention levels and 42% had better test scores. When averaging the two studies, 54% of the students demonstrated improved attention levels and 52.4% demonstrated improved test scores. Conclusions/Discussion Based on the results, the hypothesis was proven correct. Doodling does help improve a person's level of attention while listening to a classroom lesson. The data also suggested that doodling improved comprehension, not only in the students who experienced increases in their levels of attention, but also in students who reported a decrease in their attention. For those students, they had an 50% increase in their test scores. Further experiments considerations in this subject area would be to: extend the time the movie/audio book was watched or listen to; have student doodle during an actual lesson given by a teacher; extend the study to several weeks; or, explore other methods or strategies to improve levels of alertness.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0620

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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