Aurora Brovold, Berit Bungum, Helena Bichao
Drawing can assist science learning, by making thinking explicit, helping establishing connections between existing and new knowledge and providing space for students’ creativity and engagement. In this study 40 students in grade 9 (age 14-15) were taught about the immune response to vaccination, given a short course on comics drawing and then given the task of creating a comic on the topic in pairs. Through interviews with students combined with analysis of drawings, we have investigated students’ understanding of immunology as it is expressed with the help of their explanations of drawings. Results show that students adopted a variety of drawing approaches and that they achieved a good understanding of the immune response across these, age and level considered. We discuss how these positive results may be ascribed to drawing, as an active and generative task which promoted the students going deeply into the subject matter.