Through a generous grant from the Spencer Foundation, we have initiated a major research project to explore and document the use of student drawings both to study and to change education and schooling. Yet at the same time, o Educational research and assessment must become more useful in improving educational practice. The Drawing on Eduation study builds on these themes as it investigates and documents the use of drawings as a means of both studying education and schooling and changing educational practice. Although drawings are a rarely-used form of inquiry in educational research, in a variety of small studies undertaken over the past four years we have found that student drawings are a powerful method of inquiry and research. Drawings have allowed us to efficiently and effectively document aspects of education and schooling that are otherwise expensive and extremely time-consuming to document.
Preliminary work suggests that features depicted in student drawings can be coded reliably.
Features appearing in drawings also seem to have some validity as indices of differences between schools as well as changes in individual schools over time. More importantly, we have found student drawings to be a far more engaging form of inquiry for reflection and change than more commonly employed quantitative and qualitative research methods. Specifically we will study the manner in which drawings can be used in large scale research to document the educational ecology of schools and student understandings of learning, and in action research to spur reflection and change on the part of teachers and students. During the first year, collaborating researchers from both Boston College and from the study schools will make small scale pilot inquiries using alternative prompts for student drawings and alternative means of summarizing and interpreting results. In the second year, the most promising methods of using drawings will be tested in multiple sites in a coordinated manner.