Drawing expertise is obvious to the eye but the mechanisms underlying such expertise are less well known. An ecological drawing task was analyzed using a novel measure of success, degrees of error on selected angles in the image, which is an objective performance-based measure that was consistent with years of drawing experience. Thirty-three participants drew a complex three-dimensional (3D) still life by direct observation. The more experienced the participants, the more accurate they were at depicting angles in a still-life drawing. However, drawing experience made them no more accurate at verbal judgments of planar angles. This suggests that drawing expertise is consistent with actual accuracy in drawing angles—a domain-specific skill—but is not associated with more accurate overall angle judgment. Furthermore, drawing accuracy is not uniform across the image; it varies with angle size and context. Analysis of the interaction between expertise and angle size showed that the accuracy of experts was generally consistent, but less experienced drawers found some angles harder to draw than others. Finally, more experienced drawers were more accurate judging the slant of edges in the still life, suggesting that they may have a better understanding of the 3D properties of the subject.
The study of drawing generally depends on ratings by human critics and self-reported expertise of the drawers. To complement those approaches, we developed an objective continuous performance-based measure of drawing accuracy. This measure represents drawings as sets of landmark points and analyses features of particular research interest by comparing polygons of those features’ landmark points with their counterpart polygons in a veridical image. This approach produces local accuracy measures (for each polygon), a global accuracy measure (the mean across several polygons), and four distinct properties of a polygon for analysis: its size, its position, its orientation and the proportionality of its shape. We briefly describe the method and its potential research applications in drawing education and visual perception, then apply it to a specific research question: Are we more accurate when drawing in the so-called ‘positive space’ (or figure)? In a polygon-based accuracy analysis of 34 representational drawings, expert drawers outperformed less experienced participants on overall accuracy and every dimension of polygon error. Comparing polygons in the positive and negative space revealed an apparent trade-off on the different dimensions of polygon error. People were more accurate at proportionality and position in the positive space than in the negative space, but more accurate at orientation in the negative space. The contribution is the use of an objective, performance-based analysis of geometric deformations to study the accuracy of drawings at different levels of organization, here, in the positive and negative space.
Drawing from a still-life is a complex visuomotor task. Nevertheless, experts depict three-dimensional subjects convincingly with two-dimensional images. Studies of drawing have historically relied on human critics’ judgement of the drawings, the professional reputations and self-reported experience of the drawers. To extend that work, we developed an objective measurement of the accuracy of a perspective drawing, based on a comparison of the drawing with a ground truth photograph of the subject taken from the same viewpoint. If we measure the angles at intersecting edges in the drawings we can calculate both local errors and each person’s mean percentage magnitude error across angles in the still life. This gives a continuous objective measure of drawing accuracy that correlates well with years of art experience. Drawing expertise may depend to some extent on more accurate internal models of 3D space. To explore this possibility we had adults with a range of drawing experience draw a still life. Participants also made perceptual judgements of still lifes, both from direct observation and from an imagined side view. A conventional mental rotation task failed to differentiate drawing expertise. However, those who drew angles more accurately were also significantly better judges of slant, i.e., the pitch of edges in the still life. Those with the most drawing experience were significantly better judges of spatial extent, i.e., which landmarks were leftmost, rightmost, nearest, farthest etc. The ability to visualize in three dimensions the orientation and relationships of components of a still life predicts drawing accuracy and expertise.
We investigated factors related to early reading achievement: phonological processing, family support, academic self-concept. The subjects were 72 children in Grade 1. Predictors were measured in October. In May, the children's reading achievement was measured using subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised and teacher appraisals. The predictors accounted for 47%-54% of the variance in the various reading scores, but only the phonological processing measures contributed a statistically significant amount. These results support the importance of phonological processing in early reading, and raise questions about the predictive utility of family support and self-concept measures. L'article traite des facteurs reliés à la maîtrise de la lecture précoce : traitement phonologique, soutien familial et estime de soi. Les sujets étaient 72 enfants de première année. Les prédicteurs ont été mesurés en octobre. En mai, la maîtrise de la lecture a été mesurée à l'aide de sous-tests du test révisé de maîtrise de la lecture de Woodcock et des évaluations des enseignants. Les prédicteurs expliquaient l'écart dans les résultats obtenus dans une proportion de 47 à 54 %. Seules les mesures ayant trait au traitement phonologique ont contribué à des résultats statistiquement significatifs.
The authors identify the main challenges facing engineering students and instructors during hands-on design projects and give an overview of the mentor-managed approach they take in a first year design course.
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