With a Foreword by Hugh Starkey and Audrey Osler, and Afterwords by Graham Crookes, Hilary Janks and Allan Luke, this book promotes critical language education and illustrates how a critical agenda can be enacted in English language education in real classrooms. It presents four cases located in primary and secondary schools in the province of…

Over the past two decades, educational scholars have seen major shifts in how literacy is viewed. One of these shifts has been toward conceptualizing literacy as a set of social practices (Street, 1995) that people embody and value. To disrupt current definitions of literacy, the valued practices that keep those forms of literacy in place must…

The "Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education" brings together in one source research techniques that researchers can use to collect data for studies that contribute to the knowledge in early childhood education. To conduct valid and reliable studies, researchers need to be knowledgeable about numerous research…

Study separated two components of drawing: perspective taking and graphic skill. Results suggest that failures of young children to draw occlusion have less to do with graphic skill than was previously thought. Results further suggest that young children have a more general difficulty selecting one perspective and maintaining it over time.…

This study evaluated figure drawings of 28 persons with Williams syndrome, 28 with mixed etiologies, and 28 with Down syndrome. Human figures from participants with Williams syndrome were no more deviant than their counterparts, nor did they show "local-global" differences. Findings support a developmental, rather than deviant,…

Reports on three experiments involving 300 six-year old children that investigated the conditions under which young children would produce "separates" as opposed to partial occlusion drawings. (HOD)

The review of the literature concludes that the research on human figure drawing performance of learning disabled (LD) children is sparse and suffers from methodological weaknesses, particularly vague and shifting sample selection criteria. Among conclusions are that little evidence supports the claim that LD children display immature or disturbed…

Six physically maltreated children and 12 matched non-maltreated children (ages 4-8) were asked to draw their "favorite kind of day." Drawings were compared on three criteria: inclement weather, size, and movement of weather. Results showed that over a period of 18 months, maltreated and non-maltreated children consistently drew similar drawings.…

Artistic giftedness in 217 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year olds was investigated from a neo-Piagetian perspective, which articulates the increasingly complex structures for representing spatial relations in drawing during middle childhood. Gifted children structured spatial relations, composed their drawings, and used color similarly to average children,…

Tests four hypotheses to separate the effect of schemes from drawing-specific influences on young children's drawings and examines whether copies and anticipatory drawings are influenced by schemes in the same manner. (HOD)

Investigates the problem young children have in constructing diagonals, noting that, on the whole, they can not make diagonals in the horizontal/vertical configuration. (HOD)

This paper is concerned with the unfolding of human marks, beginning with scribbling, and their contribution to developing literacy. The paper argues that children's scribbles reveal a neural substrate destined for marks and influence that substrate significantly, cuing what is distinctly human in linguistic behavior and consciousness, or symbolic…

The Draw-a-Person Screening Procedure for Emotional Disturbance was evaluated with 39 deaf children, ages 9 through 12, who were divided into 2 groups: emotionally disturbed and not emotionally disturbed. Group mean scores were not significantly different; more than half the subjects in each group were misclassified using the procedure. (Author/DB)

The Clark's Drawing Abilities Test was administered to 177 secondary-level students and found to effectively identify gifted/talented visual arts students. Students draw a house, a person running, friends playing, and a fantasy drawing, and these drawings are scored on sensory, formal, expressive, and technical properties. (JDD)

Investigated effects of changing the level of motor planning demands in simple drawing tasks for which children aged 5-11 years completed or copied squares and diamonds. Results were consistent with previous studies. Low planning demands resulted in less difference between square and diamond performance than did tasks demanding higher planning.…