General Discussion The two studies described in this article were set up to investigate the hypothesis that prompting elementary students to generate drawings of arithmetic word problems facilitates problem-solving performance.The findings indicate that fifth graders appreciated the usefulness of self-generated drawings in solving word problems. After the intervention, those students made more drawings and improved their performance. On the other hand, first and second graders did not appreciate the usefulness of drawings. After a similar intervention, the first and second graders did not generate more drawings and did not do better on the word problem test.