Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Instructor Drawing in STEM Learning

This project combines approaches from educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience to determine why watching instructor drawing helps students learn and how much instructor drawing is most effective. The findings will contribute significantly to the literature and serve as a foundation to guide educators to develop and deliver more effective STEM lessons, especially in online and video-based settings.

• Sponsor
  NSF EDU Core Research program
  $736,187

• Principal investigator
  Logan Fiorella
  Associate professor, Department of Educational Psychology
  AI4STEM Education Center
  

• Co-principal investigators
  Deborah Barany
  Assistant Professor, Department of Kinesiology

• Active since
  September 2025

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Abstract

Students often learn better when instructors draw diagrams by hand during STEM lessons, particularly in video-based instruction. This finding has potentially far-reaching implications for STEM teaching, particularly given the ubiquity of instructional visuals in STEM and the increasing use of video tutorials and online instruction. However, it is not known why observing the instructor draw is effective in instructional contexts. Previous research suggests that watching the instructor draw helps guide students’ attention. Another possibility is that watching an instructor draw engages brain systems involved in motor processing, which offers an additional opportunity for representation and processing. Yet prior research has been unable to disentangle these factors from behavior alone. This project combines approaches from educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience to determine why watching instructor drawing helps students learn and how much instructor drawing is most effective. The findings will contribute significantly to the literature and serve as a foundation to guide educators to develop and deliver more effective STEM lessons, especially in online and video-based settings.

This project will use a series of experiments to systematically test two main explanations for the benefits of instructor drawing in STEM education: attentional guidance and action observation. The first study will test the effects of observing the instructor draw against a series of control conditions that allow for the isolation of the role of:

1. Directing attention
2. Gradually sequencing information
3. Observing drawing movements
4. The visibility of the instructor’s hand

A second study will test different levels of instructor drawing, such as drawing only key structural connections or drawing arrows to represent key processes, to determine the basic conditions necessary for achieving the maximum learning benefits. A final study will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test how observing instructor drawing differentially modulates connectivity within the dorsal attention and action observation networks in the brain and how these patterns of network connectivity correspond to learning outcomes. Together, the results of these studies will contribute to the literature by clarifying the mechanisms underlying action-based instruction and lay the groundwork for future classroom applications and neurocognitive research.