The Power of Art and Science Working Together!

Hello everyone, Tyrone here to give you an update on our exciting science comic! One of the scientists named Rose worked really hard to ink all 20 pages of the comic recently. Now that it’s done, they’ve been able learn some interesting things from students who have read it I wanted to share it with you all!

Just a quick reminder from a previous blog, scientists gave a pre- and post- questionnaire to students chosen to read certain materials to see whether or not there’s a difference in their attitudes towards science and how much they learn from a comic book versus more traditional formats. Students were randomly selected to read either: 1) a scientific journal article, 2) a ‘news-type’ summary of that article, 3) the comic book, or 4) nothing (the control group). The comic (of course starring myself, Burt, Toni, and Gilgamesh), journal article, and ‘news-type’ summary all told the story of how social defeat in us males has impacts on our behavior and brain, similar to what the scientists refer to as ‘bullying’ in humans.

For today’s blog, I’ll share some results on learning gains (how much readers learned from reading each format) from a group of non-science major undergrad students who participated in this cool study last Fall.

And guess what?, students who read the comic book had the highest learning gains! While students who read the scientific journal article also had high learning gains, it was still slightly less than that of the comic. Students who read the news summary had a moderate learning gain. Lastly, students who read nothing had a negative learning gain! What this tells the scientists so far is that students who read the comic book and scientific journal article were able to learn and remember more about the material they read than the other groups. I was surprised that the learning gains for the ‘news-type’ summary  were lower than the scientific article, but thinking about it, it makes sense that anyone would remember more about something they had to put effort into reading rather than just skimming. Most exciting was how well the comic did – supporting my (and the scientists!) idea that the language and graphics of comics might be better than only text writing by itself in portraying concepts that the scientists deal with all the time while doing science!

For now, I’m excited for the scientists to keep running this comic study. It’s been a lot of hard work, but so far it has received very positive reactions and we all believe it will help people from any background become more interested in science in the future! The next step is to publish the comic book and make it accessible and freely available to the public like all of you so you can learn about this research too! I hope you enjoyed the update and keep an eye out on the blog for when it’s eventually released!

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