How Drawing Facilitates Communication with Young Children

Researchers have long been observing children’s drawings and trying to understand how children use them to communicate as well as what they might explain about various aspects of child development. After 1907, when Schuyten first put forth the idea that children’s drawing might be a way of learning about intelligence, researchers began inventing systems to analyze and quantify information found in these pictures. In 1926 the Goodenough Draw-A-Man Test, a standardized system of scoring children’s drawings of the human body, was the first in a long line of instruments designed to measure intelligence and cognitive development through drawing. This particular assessment of pictures with the aim of gleaning information about the inner world of the child has been refined, simplified and re-imagined many times since (Harris in 1963, Machover in 1949, Koppitz in 1968, Naglieri in 1988) and is now called the Draw-A-Person test (DAP). It is just one example of the systems of evaluation for children’s drawings that are used routinely by professionals attempting to gain deeper understanding of children’s communicative capabilities, as well as a range of features of child development and intelligence. (Cox, 2005; Lambert, 2005) More recently, the focus has been taken away from the analysis of the product, and instead the process of drawing is being studied as a means of fostering active communication with children, sometimes for that end alone and other times with more complex goals such as acquiring more reliable witness testimony from children who have been involved in traumatic situations. (Butler, Gross & Hayne, 1995; Gross & Hayne, 1998; Lev-Wiesel & Liraz, 2007).

Researchers, educators and other professionals have continued to look at the ways that drawings can teach about the cognitive, social and emotional development of children, there is also increased investigation about how drawing might facilitate enhanced communication with children, herein are several relatively recent studies (completed between 1995 and 2007) that further extend the body of empirical support for this topic. Summary and analysis of following five studies will demonstrate some of the means by which drawing may help researchers and educators better understand and communicate with children. It will also discuss some of the weaknesses of the studies and make suggestions, based on the research, for further studies.

Drawing and Memory
Two experimental studies by Butler, Gross & Hayne (1995) looked at whether drawing effects the performance of memory in children ages 3-6. They discussed prior research, which demonstrated that children store information about experiences when they are direct participants, that older children recall more that younger ones do and that drawing is a useful technique for helping boost the memory performance of children. From this starting point they hypothesized that they could set up a memorable event (a hands on trip to a fire station) and then show that children remember more about an event when were are asked to draw it, and further that older children would recall more than younger ones. The first experiment consisted of dividing the 5-6 year old children into two groups: a draw group which was asked to describe the event while simultaneously drawing, and a tell group which was just asked to tell about the event. (Butler et al, 1995) each child was interviewed in three sections: free recall, direct recall and photo recall, and the number of items described was recorded. The results showed that the draw group did indeed recall about twice as much information during the direct recall section as the tell group, (the number of items recalled for the other sections was about the same for the draw and tell groups), they also spent an average of about 6 minutes in interview to the 1.5 of the tell group. Of note was the fact that the increased amount of information did not take away from the level of accuracy.

The next experiment consisted of looking at children in two age sets: 3-4 and 5-6 years, then, for each age set, dividing them into a draw group and a tell group. This time the same interview was performed a month after the actual event to determine whether drawing would have any bearing on memory after a longer period of time, and whether younger children would recall less information than older ones. The experiment confirmed that drawing does indeed, result in greater memory performance in children, even after a longer period of time. As in the previous experiment, children in the draw group for both age sets (3-4 and 5-6 years) recalled more information during the direct recall section (and about the same amount during free recall and photo recall): the 3-4 year old draw group remembered just slightly more than the tell group, while, as in the former experiment, the amount of data recalled was about twice as much in the 5-6 year old draw group than the tell group. As in the former experiment, there was no loss of accuracy and the draw groups in both age sets spent significantly more time in the interview. The research suggested that drawing helped children focus on subject longer, therefore having superior recall.

One of the biggest strengths of this study is that it consisted of two experiments that both had similar results. It leaves several questions to be answered, some of which Gross and Hayne answer in the following study and others, which will be addressed in the discussion.


Drawing and Verbal Expression
Two of the researchers from the previous study, Gross & Hayne, (1998) went on to further examine how drawing impacts the way that children give oral accounts of experiences. In this study, they noted that in their previous experiments the children did not express their feelings about the event and because drawing is often used in clinical settings where emotional content is key, they wanted to demonstrate that drawing is a valuable tool when trying to facilitate discussion about emotional situations that might ordinarily be difficult for children to describe. They surmised that drawing would facilitate the creation of a more detailed narrative. Once more the research consists of two different experiments.

In the first experiment, two sets of children 3-4 and 5-6 years old were all first asked to draw three human figures (to gauge drawing ability) and then instructed to give an account of three emotional experiences (happy, sad and scared). Once again, the students were separated into two groups, the draw group and the tell group. The draw children were asked to draw a time they experienced each experience and tell, while the tell group was just asked to verbally describe the experiences. The human figure drawings were analyzed using the Naglieri Draw-A-Person Quantitative Scoring System and the interviews were analyzed for number of items reported. The results indicated that, as in the previous research, drawing increased the amount of information children reported. The draw group for 3-4 year olds gave about twice as much information as the tell group and the 5-6 year olds in the draw group gave about 3 times as much information as the tell group, the information was also significantly (about 3 times) more descriptive for both age sets in the draw groups. Significant correlation also existed between drawing skill/composition and the verbal performance and number of details reported by the children. Gross & Hayne (1997), therefore suggest that the more drawing ability a child has, the better their narrative will be. The researchers were satisfied that the exploration had adequately illustrated the hypothesis, but also wanted to know if the creative, playful nature of drawing had an influence on the accuracy of the narratives.

In the second experiment, looked at whether the level of accuracy suffered when children were asked to draw and tell. Gross & Hayne (1998) interviewed 20 children ages 5-6. In each interview, the child was asked to draw and tell for one emotion (happy, sad, scared) and just tell for another, the draw/tell order changed from child to child. The accuracy of the children’s accounts was determined by their parents, who reviewed transcripts of the interview and indicated whether or not each detail was true, false or unknown. The results of the experiment demonstrated again, that children give more information when asked to draw about an emotional experience and also that accuracy does not suffer when children draw and tell: only one fact in 40 was inaccurate. (Gross & Hayne, 1998)

These experiments are strong because they reinforce the prior findings as well as one another. Weaknesses of this study were the small sample size and the single interview session. They do however, lead the reader to ask further questions which will be addressed in the discussion.


Drawing to Encourage Discussion
The aim of this study conducted by Lev-Wiesel & Liraz (2007) was to determine whether, when first asked to draw what life was like “in the shadow” of their father’s drug addictions, then asked to describe it, children ages 9-12 would give more detailed information than children who had not been asked to draw first. The researchers believed that because previous research had indicated that children who had been traumatized, tended to feel more comfortable drawing than speaking about their lives, and because drawing has also been shown to be valuable in getting people suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms to communicate, that giving children the opportunity to draw before beginning to give a narrative would better enable them to verbalize their feelings. The study also looked at the symbolic significance of color choice in the children’s drawings.

Sixty children between the ages of 9-14 were selected from drug treatment units, and were then randomly split into two groups. The children were given an explanation of the experiment and were given the option of participating. After interview sessions, drawings and transcripts of the interviews were evaluated by independent assessors. The data demonstrated that the children who drew first expressed higher levels of negative emotions, life appreciation and optimism, and gave an more descriptive narrative, while the children who did not draw had a higher level splitting (or inability to make definitive statements) and a higher level of resistance to the questions (Lev-Wiesel & Liraz, 2007). The researchers asserted that this fact gave strength to the notion that drawing helps children build verbal narratives. They also asserted that the fact that the children who were only asked to give narratives were prone to resistance and splitting illustrated that they had undergone trauma as children of drug abusers and therefore had impaired verbal expression. The researchers looked at instances of color use in the drawings and evaluators guessed what they represented, therefore making some very arbitrary statements. This aspect of the study was very weak. They suggested that because 80% of the children used black in their drawings, their study is consistent with other studies that linked color and emotion, but it is impossible to suggest that black is only indicative of negative emotions because the request was for an illustration of “life in the “shadow” of drug abuse, and shadows are typically dark or black.

This study demonstrated a strong relationship between drawing and the development of more descriptive, clear narratives, there were however, several weaknesses. First, some of the conclusions drawn in the study, though not illogical, were not backed with appropriate data. For instance, it was unclear whether the fact that the students who did not draw tended to employ splitting and resistance because they were verbally impaired. This assertion was a grand leap and the results of the study would have been better used as evidence that drawing helped children discuss traumatic situations, than to demonstrate something outside of the sphere of the study. The study would have been stronger if it had better quantified the amount of information given by the two groups in terms of number of narrative facts, emotions, etc. The color aspect of the study is so unscientific, as shown above, it is not worth further discussion.

Draw-and-tell: Fear
In a 2006, Driessnack conducted a qualitative study looking at how children describe experiences of fear. She felt that it was important to understand the way that children describe their own drawings (as opposed to the way adults interpret them). She also indicated that children often have difficulties retrieving and relating information and hoped that the use of drawing would help them “generate retrieval cues”. (Driessnack, 2006). A draw-and-tell method in which children could express instances of fear, was developed for the study. The participants were 22 second grad students ages 7-8. Data was collected during a single one-hour session conducted in the child’s school classroom after hours. Each subject was allowed to choose their drawing supplies in an effort to give them a sense of control, and then asked to tell about the time they were most afraid. Afterward the conversations were transcribed and assed using a linguistic analysis and a thematic analysis. The linguistic analysis demonstrated that by using a series of specific and unexpected linguistic elements (orienting clauses, negation, present tense and absence of resolution) the children created narrative paths that re-created their fear situations. The thematic analysis indicated five main themes within children’s fear narratives that together illustrated that the children felt fear when unprotected, vulnerable, isolated and without community (Driessnack, 2006).

Some of the weaknesses of this study were the small sample size and the single interview session as well as the lack of a non-draw group for comparison. There is no way to know if children would have utilized the same linguistic and thematic devices had they not been asked to draw. This study explored the kind of information collected in a draw-and-tell interview but did not demonstrate that this method was more effective than any other in facilitating communication.

How Drawing Illustrates Development
The final study took a look at the relationship between cognitive development and that of drawing and painting in young children. Lambert (2005) discussed the ideas of other researchers stating that children’s drawings relate to cognitive pattern and memory development, conceptual thinking and that they are a means for them to interpret the real world. She hypothesized that development does not occur in a sequential or linear manner as children transition from pre-school to school, instead, she suggested that children “revisit” familiar forms as they make developmental progress. She also hoped to gain an understanding about the way that children process information through drawing. (Lambert, 2005)

For this study, monthly samples of pictures created by 40 pre-school students over the course of a year were collected and assessed. The children were unaware that the artwork was being collected. Evaluation was done according to “Gardner’s Multiple intelligences evaluation levels for children’s art” (Lambert, 2005), a twelve category method utilized when analyzing intelligence in the visual realm. The results of the study allowed the researcher to draw conclusions about the ways that children make meaning from the synchronicities between various types of patterns, objects, sizes and forms. The analysis showed growing sophistication in the drawings, they became increasingly representational and when non-representational, they showed progressive development of purposeful pattern making, which Lambert (2007) interpreted as manifestation of the developing ability to symbolically represent thoughts and evidence of more highly developed abstract thinking. She also asserted that this emergent comprehension of symbolic meaning was evidence of growing complexity in individual reasoning and problem solving. She found the simultaneous progressive cognitive development and the outward transition from pre-school to school to be significant and took it to be illustrative of the fact that the children were making meaning with their art.

The fact that artwork was collected over the course of an entire year was a strong point of this study, because it allowed the researcher to witness the development of the student’s work. A weakness of this study is the lack of any hard data. It is interesting and insightful, but ultimately, without any concrete data, it loses the ability to convince and is more illustrative and anecdotal than factual.


Discussion
Children’ s drawings have been studied for the last century, but more recently, researchers have been focusing not only on the product, but also more on the process of drawing and the kinds of communication it might help facilitate with children. The research in this review ranges from experiments looking at how drawing can help facilitate improved verbal communication to ways that drawings can help us gain a better understanding of children’s cognitive development. The importance of understanding how young people develop is clear, children represent the future and therefore, understanding the best ways to communicate with them is key to building the best society possible. Drawing is one important way that young children express themselves, this review illustrates some of the ways it can be utilized for better understanding and communication. The research in the first three articles indicated that drawing does facilitate accurate, descriptive verbal communication when utilized during the interview process. The implication here is that drawing can be employed as a means of extracting more complete and detailed witness testimony from children, a way of getting them to better communicate about traumatic events such as and parental drug use and could even potentially help to detect sexual abuse. (Butler, Gross & Hayne , 1995; Lev-Wiesel & Liraz, 2007; Driessnack, 2006). The fourth article discusses how the draw-and-tell interview method could be used to get children suffering with grief, pain, or chronic illness (or living with parents or siblings suffering) to communicate about their experiences, which could help them to understand the relevance and make meaning in their lives. Drawing can also be used to gauge cognitive development as is illustrated in the final article. This review is a just a survey of a few of the ways that drawing is being used to foster better communication with children.

The first two articles represent four different experiments demonstrating that children given the opportunity to draw while they build a narrative give about twice as much accurate, detailed information as those who are not asked to draw (Butler, Gross & Hayne, 1995; Gross & Hayne, 1997). This means that drawing helps children formulate clearer more detailed accounts of the events in their lives. The Lev-Wiesel & Liraz (2007) study described prior research illustrating that children whose parents are drug abusers tend to have various difficulties including high levels of psychological distress, verbal and cognitive difficulties and lower social skills. They also discussed research demonstrating that emotional healing can come from reconstruction of autobiographical memory and from being a spectator to one’s experience. It is for these reasons they believe the use of drawing is a valuable communication tool. By demonstrating that children are better able to verbalize their feelings when given the opportunity to draw (either before or during storytelling) the first three articles all support the idea that drawing helps children remember, describe and narrate events in their lives. The use of drawing as a way for children to come to terms with the unhealthy life situations by finding ways to articulate their suffering is one important means of utilizing drawing to help children develop. The fourth article in this review looks at the way drawing helps build narrative, but focuses on the kind of stories that are told by children. Driessnack (2006) suggests that children’s stories are told differently when they are asked to draw them, and that drawing helps children re-create and explore frightening situations. The final article explores the way the drawings children make over a long period of time, communicate the children's development. Taken together these articles exemplify some ways that drawing is valuable as a way of understanding children.
Several of the studies left questions that could be investigated in future studies. Some questions in the Butler, Gross & Hayne (1995) study are, first, did the children perform better specifically because they were drawing, or because they were in the interview setting for a much longer period of time? Next, is it possible that the act of drawing simply made the children feel more comfortable, and if this was the real reason for the increased amount of information given, perhaps drawing could be substituted with playing with clay or some other activity. Both of these questions could be looked at in future studies. The experiments by Gross & Hayne (1998) left a few questions, for instance, what was it about drawing that encouraged children to speak? They suggested that it could be a variety of things: drawing helps children retrieve memory by enabling their own retrieval cues or perhaps it helps them better organize thoughts and therefore tell a more coherent narrative. It would be interesting to see how these questions are answered with future studies. A huge flaw in the Lev-Wiesel & Liraz (2007) study was the fact that they used a very emotional and leading question: “what is life like it the shadow of your father’s addiction?” it would be interesting to see how different the study would be if the question was less leading and the data was evaluated in a more quantitative manner. The qualitative look at how children's construction of fear narratives was interesting, but left me wondering what the data would have looked like had there been a control group to compare the storytelling styles with (Driessnack, 2006). I would like to see if the narratives are really different when children are asked to draw compared with children who are just asked to describe a frightening experience. Finally, the longitudinal nature of Lambert’s (2007) study was strong, but the data collection seemed spotty. I think a similar length of time and collection method with more specific, quantified criteria would better enable readers to understand the specific kinds correlations that exist between drawing development and social and cognitive development. The range of research being conducted about the usefulness of drawing in communicating with and understanding the way children communicate their development is wide, this is just a look at a few of the ways researchers are using it as a tool for better understanding children.

References

Butler, S., Gross, J., & Hayne, H. (1995). The effect of drawing on memory performance in
young children. Developmental Psychology, 31 (4), 597-608.

Cox, M. (2005). The pictorial world of the child. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Driessnack, M. (2006) Draw-and-tell conversations with children about fear. Qualitative Health Research, 16 (10), 1414-1435.

Gross, J. & & Hayne, H. (1998). Drawing facilitates children’s verbal reports of emotionally laden events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 4 (2), 163-179.

Lambert, B. (2005). Children's drawing and painting from a cognitive perspective: a longitudinal study. Early Years, 25 (3), 249-269.

Lev-Wiesel, & R., Liraz, R. (2007) Drawing vs. narratives: drawing as a tool to encourage verbalization in children whose fathers are drug abusers. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 12 (1), 67-75.

Ter Laak, J., De Goede, M., Aleva, A., & Van Rijswijk, P. (2005) The Draw-A-Person Test: An Indicator of Children’s Socioemotional Adaptation? The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 166 (1), 77-92.