4. Discussion
4.1. Empirical contributions
The present set of experiments makes three empirical contributions
to the field. First, this study shows strong and consistent
evidence that students who are asked to generate drawings (with
sufficient support) during reading a scientific text that describes a
causal sequence perform better than students who read without
drawing, both on a comprehension test (d = 0.85 in Experiment 1
and d = 0.52 in Experiment 2) and on a drawing test (d = 1.15 in Experiment
1 and d = 1.87 in Experiment 2). Thus, the generative
drawing effect can be extended to a new domain, and therefore