First-year engineering students to study ‘sketchnoting’

Can doodling count as classwork?

It sure can when a student is using “sketchnoting,” a note taking technique combining traditional text with symbols and illustrations, and this coming academic year, more than 800 Auburn University pre-engineering students will learn all about it.

Created about 10 years ago, sketchnoting is a highly effective style of note taking that helps students pay attention and retain information during lectures and aid in the development of critical thinking skills. In addition to writing down basic text, sketchnoting includes drawing boxes or bubbles to group similar concepts, arrows and dotted lines to connect related ideas and symbols that can stand in for words. These notes help students create a visual map of what they hear and see to identify patterns and connections and synthesize what they’re learning in the classroom.

Sketchnoting expert Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, an associate professor of industrial design in the College of Architecture, Design and Construction (CADC), has trained Auburn engineering faculty to teach the technique. She understands if some students don’t immediately realize its value, because she once felt the exact same way.

“I learned it almost by accident about 10 years ago,” she said. “I didn’t enjoy it at first, and then it kind of hit me, and now I do all my work this way. It’s been life-changing for me, so I try to help as many people as I can.”

Bringing sketchnoting to engineers

Last year, Paepcke-Hjeltness was invited to a faculty meeting in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering to give a brief overview of sketchnoting. When Assistant Dean and Director of Student Services Janet Moore saw the potential benefits for engineering students, she immediately asked Paepcke-Hjeltness to partner with the college.

“Sketchnoting is just a different technique; the coding, the clustering, the distinguishing of essential from nonessential; also, the pen to paper is something students don’t necessarily get in a high-technology world,” Moore said. “Research in neuroscience and learning tells us when students write by hand, brain areas involved in verbal, visual and motor information processing sync up with areas critical to memory formation. That’s why sketchnoting has the potential to help engineering students become both critical and creative thinkers.”

In sketchnoting, symbols can stand in for words, helping students to retain information during lectures.

An overhead projector shows the work of sketchnoting expert and Auburn faculty member Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness.

This past summer, Paepcke-Hjeltness trained 13 Auburn engineering faculty members in sketchnoting.

In addition to writing down basic text, sketchnoting includes drawing boxes or bubbles to group similar concepts.

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A new course: Engineering Freshman Seminar

Paepcke-Hjeltness is teaching sketchnoting to students in 14 sections of UNIV 1100, Engineering Freshman Seminar, this fall and eight more next spring. This newly designed course, offered in partnership with Auburn’s First Year Experience Office, is designed as a substitute for the required ENGR 1100 Engineering Orientation course. This past summer, Paepcke-Hjeltness trained 13 engineering faculty members who will be reinforcing those lessons in class, in addition to offering Lego Serious Play and other learning strategies to help students succeed. 

“The purpose behind offering Engineering Freshman Seminar as an alternative to Engineering Orientation is to offer students more in-depth engineering exploration experiences, including career and major exploration, college exploration and self-development around academic and career goals,” Moore said. “The sections are small with a maximum of 40, so we believe students will develop a sense of community and connection to the college through this course and their interaction with other engineering students and the instructors. We are very excited that UNIV 1100 has been very popular with our incoming students.” 

Quantifying benefits of sketchnoting

As students learn more about sketchnoting this semester, Paepcke-Hjeltness will, too. She is collecting data on its effectiveness, both in the engineering classes and in the CADC course she’s offering this fall.

“There will be a sketchnoting assignment given by the instructors at the beginning, middle and end of the semester,” she said. “We can use these to compare and analyze.”

She plans to follow up with students after a year to measure their attitudes and whether they’ve retained their skills, and she hopes to eventually publish her findings. While Paepcke-Hjeltness knows sketchnoting works, there are very few academic studies that have proven its effectiveness. She’s hoping her findings on campus can quantify the value of sketchnoting in a way that, to the best of her knowledge, has never been done before.

“I’m hoping this can potentially be a big change for Auburn,” she said. “People have seen the benefits of sketchnoting before, but never on this scale.”