Effect of Materials on Preschool Children's Ability to Represent a Man

Abstract

61 nursery school children were asked to construct a man, using six different methods. The data indicate that the ability to identify body pans, eye-hand coordination, or the use of particular materials made no significant differences in success. Success seemed more related to the understanding that shapes may have symbolic meaning.

The effects of different drawing materials on children’s drawings of positive and negative human figures

“…Whilst children showed mixed success across the tasks, he found that the representation of the human figure across the tasks was significantly correlated, namely a low scoring child on the drawing task obtained a low score on the puzzle tasks. The discrepancy (Brittain & Chien, 1980;Golomb, 1973) thus appears to lie in the interpretation of the results rather than the empirical findings, largely arising, in Brittain's view, from Golomb's not correlating children's performance between tasks, instead accepting absolute scores from each task separately. Brittain maintains that whilst differences in representational media may play a role in children's performance on representational tasks, children's developmental level remains relatively constant across tasks.…”

“…Conflicting findings come from Brittain and Chien (1980), who claimed that materials only play a minor role in human figure representation. Brittain's (1986) study aimed to address this empirical discrepancy, and was also designed to examine the differences in procedures between Golomb's (1973) work and his own (1980).…”