How Hand-Drawn Text and Graphics Improve Student Outcomes

• Impact of Math Anxiety and Perfectionism: Math anxiety and perfectionistic concerns negatively impact math performance, with a significant correlation between fear of making mistakes and lower achievement in mathematics.
• Beneficial Role of Mistakes and Growth Mindset: Normalizing mistakes and fostering a growth mindset improves students' attitudes towards math, emphasizing that perfection is not necessary for success.
• Effectiveness of Hand-drawn Illustrations and Positive Emotional Design: Hand-drawn illustrations and materials with positive emotional design, including anthropomorphic features and rounded shapes, enhance math learning outcomes, engagement, and retention, making content more relatable and memorable.

Common Fears

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, we learn that the otherwise fearless Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes. In Back to the Future, the time-traveling Marty McFly fears nothing more than being called "chicken." In The Lion King, Simba fears taking responsibility. Woody is afraid of being replaced in Toy Story. Elsa fears her own powers in Frozen . . .

Fear is a common human phenomenon. Regardless of its precise cause, fear can keep people from succeeding in certain areas of life.

Indeed, both the anxiety caused by math and the fear of failure in math have significant negative consequences on students’ abilities to succeed in math.

Fear of Failure

A meta-analysis of 223 studies with approximately 385,441 individual participants found an overall average effect size of -.28 between math anxiety and math performance [1]. Simply, the more students doubt their abilities and actions the worse they perform on math assessments [2].

A meta-analysis of 67 studies on the effects of perfectionism and academic performance, found that while perfectionistic strivings can be beneficial to academic performance and positive learning outcomes, perfectionistic concerns are detrimental, leading to negative academic and psychological outcomes [3]. Overall, there is a strong positive correlation between concerns over makings mistakes and math anxiety [4].

Mistakes Happen

Normalizing the experience of making mistakes in math is crucial, particularly for students who are negatively impacted by anxiety, perfectionism, and fear of negative evaluation [5].

As a result, we have developed a learning environment that fosters a mindset where perfection is not seen as necessary for success in math.

A Helping Hand

An important way we support a mindset free of anxiety and the fear of failure is through the use of hand-drawing in our presentation of math problems and supportive illustrations.

The use of handwriting when presenting math problems has been shown to improve performance compared with digital fonts [6]. Similarly, comics are considered more attractive and inviting than traditional mathematic materials [7], and the use of comic-styled materials has been shown to improve performance, enjoyment, engagement, and retention in mathematical learning [8], particularly for students with diverse learning needs [9]. Cartoons have likewise been shown to improve both the understanding and use of mathematical symbols, terms, and concepts [10].

Helping to make sense of these outcomes, a meta-analysis of 28 studies on positive emotional design found that the use of shapes with rounded edges and anthropomorphic features (e.g., representing human facial features) in learning materials significantly enhances learning outcomes [11]. Positive emotional design, particularly in complex subjects like mathematics, helps make content more relatable and memorable by aligning with the learners' affective states and boosting engagement and retention [11].

The Importance of Imperfection

Another way to say this is that people tend to see imperfections as a sign of human care and find imperfections more appealing and relatable than perfectly rendered graphics [12]. In this sense, hand-drawing effectively creates a sense of warmth, approachability, and personal connection that other illustrative techniques cannot [13].

At a deeper level, the imperfections in hand-drawn graphics serve to mirror the imperfections in human learning and problem-solving processes, demonstrating to students that perfection is not required for successful learning or problem-solving [4].

It’s Okay Not to be Perfect

Our app is designed with a singular and simple goal in mind—student success. We believe that, given the right space and opportunities, all students can succeed. And, in student success, mindset matters.

We know that every student who engages with our app does so with different experiences with math and differing expectations of their own abilities in math.

In this way, it is critically important for us to communicate to students that success at math does not require perfect performance. We want to show them that we—even as expert math educators and math app developers—are not perfect.

That is why we have designed our learning experience and interactions so that students gain confidence, not in their ability to always get something right, but in attempting problems without the fear of failure. Through the strategic use of hand-drawing, we invite students into an environment where they know they don’t always need to have the right answer, they simply need to know it is okay to not be perfect.

References

[1] Barroso, C., Ganley, C. M., McGraw, A. L., Geer, E. A., Hart, S. A., & Daucourt, M. C. (2021). A meta-analysis of the relation between math anxiety and math achievement. Psychological Bulletin, 147(2), 134. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/bul0000307

[2] Isabel Nunez-Pena, M., & Bono, R. (2021). Math anxiety and perfectionistic concerns in multiple-choice assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(6), 865-878. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1836120

[3] Osenk, I., Williamson, P., & Wade, T. D. (2020). Does perfectionism or pursuit of excellence contribute to successful learning? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Assessment, 32(10), 972. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pas0000942

[4] McCaughey, N. J., Hill, T. G., & Mackinnon, S. P. (2022). The association of self-efficacy, anxiety sensitivity, and perfectionism with statistics and math anxiety. Personality Science, 3, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.7091

[5] Firouzeh, S., & Turkan, D. (2022). Investigating the relationship between personality traits, fear of negative evaluation, and perceived stress with math anxiety of female students. Journal of Educational Sciences & Psychology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.51865/JESP.2022.1.06

[6] Chan, J. Y. C., Linnell, L. B. D., Trac, C., Drzewiecki, K. C., & Ottmar, E. (2023). Test of Times New Roman: Effects of font type on mathematical performance. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-023-09333-8

[7] Chu, Y. L. L., & Toh, T. L. (2020). A framework for designing mathematics instruction using comics at the primary school level. Journal of Research and Advances in Mathematics Education, 5(3), 218-230. https://doi.org/10.23917/jramathedu.v5i3.11373

[8] Azamain, M. S., Shahrill, M., Musa, N. K. H., & Batrisyia, I. (2020). How using comics can assist in determining the students’ learning of distance-time graphs. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1470(1), 012005. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1470/1/012005/meta

[9] Batrisyia, I., Shahrill, M., Azamain, M. S., & Musa, N. K. H. (2020). Captivating elementary school students’ interests in solving mathematics word problems with the use of comics. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1470(1), 012006. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1470/1/012006/meta

[10] Aygün, D., Karadeniz, M. H., & Bütüner, S. Ö. (2020). Reflections of concept cartoons applications to 5th grade students' use of mathematical symbols, terms/concepts. International Journal of Educational Studies in Mathematics, 7(3), 151-172. https://doi.org/10.17278/ijesim.749497?sid=semanticscholar

[11] Wong, R. M., & Adesope, O. O. (2021). Meta-analysis of emotional designs in multimedia learning: A replication and extension study. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 357-385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09545-x

[12] Suher, J., Szocs, C., & van Ittersum, K. (2021). When imperfect is preferred: the differential effect of aesthetic imperfections on choice of processed and unprocessed foods. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49(5), 903-924. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-021-00783-1

[13] Liu, X., Zhou, H., & Liu, J. (2022). Deep learning-based analysis of the influence of illustration design on emotions in immersive art. Mobile Information Systems, 2022. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/misy/2022/3120955/