It is official: comics are an effective tool for teaching science.
The journal CBE-Life Science Education just published my article Are Comic Books an Effective Way to Engage Nonmajors in Learning and Appreciating Science? Although there have been a number of academic papers published that have advocated the use of comics for student literacy, as far as I know this is the first to systematically evaluate comics used in teaching. My result show that a) students learn just fine from comics and b) comics can change student opinions of a subject (in this case biology) for the better. This is the culmination of a project that started in 2004 with a grant from the National Science Foundation to create Optical Allusions.
The paper is available for download for free at the journal’s website (click on the title above). You can check out the whole excellent issue here. Be sure to download the paper so it gets a lot of hits and it looks like everyone loves educational comics! Because, of course, they do…
P.S. the answer to the question in the title is “yes”
-
Excellent article. I wish there had been more things like this when I was in college. As an art major, science classes were a real struggle for me. I barely scraped by in Physics. Someone gave me a bum steer and told me Historical Geology would be a good fit for me. I did have one biology teacher who assigned open-ended projects in addition to tests. Even then, one of my projects was a comic strip. This was in the 80s, so this prof was very forward thinking. I certainly was interested in the content, but for me art has always been the best way to “show what I know.”
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://www.jayhosler.com/jshblog/wp-trackback.php?p=1305