In this article, the author describes a classroom lesson relating to still life and the artist, Ralph Goings. While students painted, they discussed about how Ralph Goings shows that everyday, household items can be visually appealing. To give everyday objects a new, unintended purpose is a powerful way to rediscover the world. In younger…

When drawing real scenes or copying simple geometric figures young children are highly sensitive to parallel cues and use them effectively. However, this sensitivity can break down in surprisingly simple tasks such as copying a single line where robust directional errors occur despite the presence of parallel cues. Before we can conclude that this…

Investigation of children's understanding of the earth can reveal much about the origins and development of scientific knowledge. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) claim that children construct coherent, theory-like mental models of the earth. However, more recent research has indicated that children's knowledge of the earth is fragmented and…

This article presents an exploratory study into the use of diagrammatic representation to aid problem-solving. It consists of a case study of one preschooler (3.9 years) who over a 12-month period was encouraged to use drawing as a way of reasoning about daily problems or issues. For this child, diagrammatic representation was found to facilitate…

The purpose of this article is to explore how the descriptive processes developed by the Prospect School (1965-1990), in North Bennington, Vermont, and used in the Prospect School Teacher Education Program (1968-1990) managed to grasp to art in everyday experience and serve as a way of revealing, supporting, and celebrating the emerging humanness…

Background: Recognizing that arts education is important in facilitating learning and in enhancing creativity in students, recent education reform in Hong Kong has sought to promote arts education and efforts to encourage creative expression through different art forms. Among different modes of creative arts expression, drawing has been suggested…

This student artist's handbook uses drawings and diagrams to demonstrate the basic structure, proportions, and expressive nature of the human form from an artist's point of view. Emphasis is placed upon the relationship of mass to movement. Drawings of the figure in action reveal the rhythmic relationship of muscles and their effect upon surface…

Considered the motivating force behind art works and how students can be stimulated to create. (RK)

A tension exists between two schools of thought regarding the development of children's drawings. One position places great emphasis on the relatively invariant sequence in which figural differentiation comes about, and attempts to explicate the graphic logic which yields the rule-governed changes which can be observed in children's drawings. The…

This slide talk offers advice to adults to help children cope with nightmares. Children are encouraged (1) to assume power over the dream by drawing it; (2) separate the frightened part of the self from the problem-solving self; (3) let the picture describe the problem; (4) ask the picture to speak; (5) see how the dreamer's power matches the…

This paper presents a process-structural model of the planning of drawings in childhood, and reports on seven experiments investigating children's ability to plan their drawings in advance. Three constructs are basic to the model: a figural scheme or schema, a spatial mental model, and a working memory called "M operator" or…

This paper reports a follow-up study of 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old subjects who had participated in an investigation of the nature of children's and adults' ability to graphically represent expressive qualities (i.e., happy, sad, angry, loud, quiet, hard). In the original study, the use of literal representation (such as a smiling face on a tree) and…

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis (derived from Piaget's theory of cognitive development) that the structure of children's drawings and play-constructions, being expressions of the same underlying function, should be similar. Two groups of 4- and 6-year-old nursery school children were given a testing task consisting of an orally…

Data obtained under naturalistic conditions do not support the notion of a close fit between the growth of geometric concepts during the concrete operational period and "realism" in art. Realism here refers to the ability to portray the objective proportions of a figure, to coordinate spatial relations and distances, and to represent a…

How information is represented in visual images was explored in five experiments where subjects judged whether or not various properties were appropriate for given animals. The results support a constructivist notion of imagery, and the idea that images may act as analogues to percepts. (Author/DEP)