A study was undertaken to determine how children of different ages used drawing to present an atypical situation, to what extent children's responses were governed by their increasing cognitive competence, and to what extent children's responses reflected an increasingly articulate grasp of the medium itself. A total of 137 children in…

Current beliefs about how children draw emphasize the importance of drawing from memory, rather than from observation. However, an experiment with children aged seven to nine showed that observation drawings included greater detail and complexity. More research on observation drawing is recommended. (IS)

Analysis of drawings by 26 children indicated striking contrasts in subject matter and style between girls and boys, but did not present stereotyped images of sex roles. The contrasts could not be specifically attributed to genetic, social, or psychological differences between the sexes. (MJL)

As an example of the insights into creativity and cultural influences which may be gained by analyzing children's spontaneous play, the authors present a case study from Jamaica, where they observed young boys making their own toy trucks. (SJL)

Sixty-six first-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children were tested for their sensitivity to the dimensions of syntactic repleteness (e.g., line variation) and expression (i.e., the feelings conveyed by a work). (Author/MP)

Examined the effects of race and gender on social distance in the drawings of African- and European-American children. Found that social distance was smallest for same-sex and race peers and greatest for cross-sex and race peers. African-American children placed a smaller distance between same sex/same-race dyads than European-American children.…

Examines young children's emerging abilities to organize their written language performance under different writing conditions, before they are able to read and write conventionally. (PCB)

This study of the drawings produced by 34 autistic and 33 normal children (age 68-211 months) at the same developmental level found no intergroup differences on fragmentation of geometric design drawings, but significant differences in geometric design overlap and human figure overlap and fragmentation. (JDD)

Offers an interpretive frame for viewing children's growth as creators of imaginative worlds. Suggests that writing development depends not only on children's discovery of cognitive and linguistic strategies but on children's discovery that writing can help authors create coherence in their worlds beyond texts. (MS)

Investigated effects of varying doses of psychostimulant medications on expressive qualities evident in children's art products. Findings from eight children affected by attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder indicated that specific areas assessed were influenced by varying doses of medications. Data from art corresponded in positive manner to…

Describes the drawings of an autistic 8-year-old boy and investigates the role of art in his life considering art's relationship, by style and content, to his emotional and daily experiences. Indicates his four distinct drawing styles along with what these styles suggest about art's narrative qualities and its meaning-making possibilities. (CMK)

Investigated the development of individual style in 3- to 10-year-old children's drawings. Assessed about one-third of children as having distinctive styles; these children were most frequently younger and showed higher aesthetic and creativity ratings in their drawings. Considered the probable sequence in children's development of artistic style.…

Investigated the effects of menarche on the continuity of adolescent girls' drawing styles. Found that individual styles over a 4-year period were discernible across 6-month intervals but not when the interval spanned menarche, indicating a discontinuity related to developmental transitions. (JPB)

The current study focuses on data collected from children in the United States shortly after the Yugoslavia-NATO conflict. Fifty-six children in two Midwestern states were asked to draw a picture of peace and a picture of war. Two major themes, peace as interpersonal interactions and peace as negative peace, emerged from the qualitative analysis…

This article, which is a revised version of a paper presented at the XXIV World Congress of OMEP conference in Melbourne in July 2004, reports on a study that explored young children's (5-9 years) vision of their future environment in South Africa--as temporal dimension, illustrating their conceptual understanding of this concept. A sample of 320…