Considering Questions and Methods

Questions:  Why do these kids always sigh and roll their eyes when I ask them to pull out a piece of DRAWING paper? Do they hate drawing or fear it?

The most direct way to determine whether your students’ reservations are the result of hatred or fear would be to conduct a survey.  Ask questions about how they feel before, during, and after the drawing process; whether they ever draw outside of school or unprompted by schoolwork; find out if the subject matter has an effect on student perception of the task.  Some of these questions could be asked before a study is performed to help determine a baseline and further hone variable and then a routine could be established in which students are given drawing tasks and asked to gauge their feelings at different parts of the process.  To measure whether the drawing task itself or related curricular factors are to blame, you would need to find a way to conduct drawing tasks under differing conditions and students would have to be far enough removed from routine expectations (for example, if they expect a larger project to fallow preliminary sketching as a normal part of workflow in your classroom) to determine whether expected outcomes are to be blamed.