Children’s Drawing,Self Expression,Identity and the Imagination

Directions, Volume 18 Number 1 [1] suggests that postmodern theory is beginning to have a significant effect upon educational practice. Atkinson [2] has directed attention towards the effects of both the construction of the subject and the real within art teaching. Much postmodern theory challenges the unitary, pre–existing subject. This paper will argue that the persistence of an ideology of self–expression which asserts that all representation is in connection with (should be read in relation to) a singular, pure, pre–existing self acts to limit our understandings of the complexity of children’s representations and is in conflict with many contemporary positions. Research has centred on the development of ‘out of school’ sketchbooks. Large sketchbooks were given out to nursery and reception children paired with older siblings in primary education. Possible drawing activities and interests were discussed and children were left to develop the sketchbooks at home. Two weeks later (including a half term holiday) the children were interviewed in relation to the drawings developed. The drawings have been considered in relation to contemporary approaches to self and identity. The conclusions of this paper revolve around the possibilities of reading children’s drawing in relation to self and identity through the interaction of social context, discursive practice and agency in a manner which is suggested by Ricouer’s formulation of the social imaginary. Additionally, the substitution of tenacious notions of expression with concepts of agency and contingency grounded in the characteristics of ‘citationality’, articulation and narrative are suggested as a basis for developing the educational potential of drawing.     

Children’s attributions about teachers’ intentions

Hostile attribution bias (HAB) has been shown to predict aggressive behavior, especially toward peers. The current study examined whether HAB is also related to conflict with teachers, an important predictor of academic and social success in school‐aged children. A total of 282 second to fourth grade boys in 74 classrooms completed a self‐report measure of HAB toward teachers, while their teachers assessed conflict in the teacher–student relationship. Results supported the presence of a positive relationship between HAB toward teachers and conflict with teachers. These findings suggest that HAB toward teachers may be an indicator of difficulties and, pending further research, a potential avenue for intervention to improve teacher–student relationships.     

Conversations Around Young Children’s Drawing: The Impact of the Beliefs of Significant Others at Home and School

Children learn to make meanings in communities of practice through interaction with more experienced others. Young children’s strategies for and attitudes to learning are determined by the sociocultural contexts in which they practise those strategies, including learning how to draw within the distinct cultures of home and school. Evidence of meaning making — 2 and 3D representations involving drawing, modelling and play with objects — was collected over one month periods in the Autumns of 98, 99 and 00 from seven young children in home and as they settled into new pre–school and school settings in the North of England. The evidence of the seven children’s meaning making, recorded by photographs and scrap books of their representations, was used as a stimulus in dialogues to elicit parents’ and practitioners’ beliefs about the value and significance of different modes meaning making, including drawing in the contexts of home and school. Their conversations were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Evidence from the perspectives of parents, practitioners and the children was triangulated with evidence of contextual features for learning around the children’s drawings. Episodes from analysis of the data sets will be used to illustrate how the children were inducted into the conventions of ‘school’ drawing whilst often retaining a distinct personal drawing agenda at home. Implications will be drawn for the status and function of drawing in the education of young children in formal and informal learning contexts.     

Parental Reports of Children’s Scale Errors in Everyday Life

Scale errors refer to behaviors where young children attempt to perform an action on an object that is too small to effectively accommodate the behavior. The goal of this study was to examine the frequency and characteristics of scale errors in everyday life. To do so, the researchers collected parental reports of children’s (age range = 13–21 months at onset) scale errors over a 6‐month period. All but 1 of the parents (N = 30) reported at least 1 scale error with an average of 3.2 scale errors per child. These results suggest that most, if not all, children commit scale errors during early childhood.     

Taking Comics Seriously: Children’s Periodical Reading in England in the 1990s

Periodicals, that is newspapers, magazines and comics, have always represented a substantial proportion of children’s reading outside school. They have not always been accepted or considered as reading within schools. Martin Coles and Chris Hall here present the results of the most recent survey to shed light on the periodical reading which is actually happening among today’s children. They present some important findings which have the potential to alter significantly the ways teachers see this kind of reading and its possible contribution to the development of literacy.     

Action,Autobiography and Aesthetics in Young Children’s Self-Initiated Drawings

Lark-Horovitz, Lewis, and Luca [1973] described the emergence of ‘subject matter specialists,’ children who create series of self-initiated or voluntary drawings featuring consistent themes, characters, or settings that seem particularly compelling to them. A decade-long study of the images preschool and kindergarten children create when invited to draw in their own sketchbooks in the context of a weekly art class suggests that the choice of what to draw shapes the process of learning how to draw in decisive ways. The interests young children develop and pursue in drawing and in other forms of symbolic play are influenced by gender and by culture, by personality and circumstance. The choices children make inevitably open certain possibilities and foreclose others, shaping early artistic learning in decisive ways. Many early childhood educators [e.g., Katz, 1993] maintain that young children’s learning should be firmly grounded in first-hand experience. However, children whose drawings are autobiographical in content may be less consistent in choosing topics for drawing and prone to pass the time between significant images by drawing designs and symbols which seem less personally meaningful and engaging. Children who draw upon imaginative themes seem to have an inexhaustible source of inspiration ready at hand when they begin to draw. According to Egan [1988], the fictional or mythic nature of these representations may serve young children’s quest to make sense of their experiences in ways that explorations of the everyday do not.     

Children’s private speech during algorithmic and heuristic drawing tasks

This cross-sectional study examined the private speech and task-related activity of 108 school-aged children while they drew pictures of real objects (i.e., a house, a person, and an animal) and make-believe objects (i.e., a house, a person, and an animal) to investigate developmental and task-related changes in self-regulation. Composite scores for each first-grade (N=36), third-grade (N=36), and fifth-grade (N=36) participant were calculated from the repeated raw frequencies of overall private speech and private speech in conjunction with task-related behavior during the two types of drawing activities (i.e., real and make-believe). Scores were then analyzed using regression analysis and 3×2 (Grade×Task Type) ANOVA’s to explore study hypotheses. This study found that: (1) there was a concave curvilinear developmental trend in overall private speech production, (2) participants utilized more private speech during heuristic (i.e., make-believe) drawing tasks than algorithmic (i.e., real) drawing tasks, and (3) school-aged children used private speech in conjunction with task-related behavior in a different manner during the two types of drawing activities. These findings contribute to the Vygotskian perspective regarding the development and function of private speech.     

Children’s use of drawing as a pre-writing strategy

In this study the writing products of 60 third-grade students, who drew before writing a story on a self-selected topic, was compared with the writing products of 59 third-grade students who wrote without drawing. The students in the group which drew before writing tended to produce more words, more sentences and more idea units, and their overall writing performance was higher than the students who wrote without drawing. These findings were consistent for boys as well as girls. Implications for writing research and instruction are discussed.     

Learning about literacy: Children’s versions of the Literacy Hour

This article reports on an enquiry into the responses of a class of Year 1 children, aged 5‐6 years, to the first eight months of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Children were given incomplete drawings to represent the four parts of the Literacy Hour. In completing the drawings the children made their own interpretations of the Literacy Hour. They could choose to write thought or speech bubbles, draw faces and expressions, make written or dictated comments about the teacher and the children portrayed. The methodology enabled these young children to articulate detailed responses to their experience of a particular style of teaching. Each child documented a range of attitudes to and feelings about whole class teaching, group work and the plenary session. These insights, which were often challenging, put the emotional dimension of learning at the centre of their experiences of the NLS.     

Children’s Eyewitness Memory for Multiple Real‐Life Events

The present research examined the influence of prior knowledge on children’s free recall, cued recall, recognition memory, and source memory judgments for a series of similar real‐life events. Forty children (5–12 years old) attended 4 thematic birthday parties and were later interviewed about the events that transpired during the parties using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development protocol. Of the events, half were generic in that they could have occurred at any birthday party, and half were specific to the theme of the party. Older children demonstrated more evidence of using gist‐based information to guide their memory performance than did younger children. However, younger children were able to use global gist to inform their source memory judgments, qualifying past word‐learning research.     

Children’s Cortisol and the Quality of Teacher–Child Relationships in Child Care

Teacher–child relationships were examined as predictors of cortisol change in preschool children. Saliva for assays was collected from one hundred and ninety‐one 4‐year‐olds (101 boys) in the mornings and afternoons on 2 days at child care, and before and after a series of challenging tasks and a teacher–child interaction session outside the classroom. Parents reported on children’s temperament, teachers and children reported on teacher–child relationship quality, and observers rated group‐level teacher insensitivity. Teacher‐reported relationship conflict predicted cortisol increases during teacher–child interaction and teacher‐reported overdependence predicted cortisol increases from morning to afternoon, even after controlling for individual teacher, child, and classroom characteristics. The findings extend earlier work by suggesting that cortisol change across the child‐care day is influenced by teacher–child relationship characteristics.     

Young Children’s Representations of Spatial and Functional Relations Between Objects

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2‐dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects.     

Adrenocortical Underpinnings of Children’s Psychological Reactivity to Interparental Conflict

This study examined interrelationships among children’s cortisol reactivity and their psychological reactivity to interparental conflict in a sample of 208 first graders (mean age = 6.6 years). Assessments of children’s psychological reactivity to conflict distinguished among their distress, hostile, and involvement responses across multiple methods (i.e., observation, questionnaire) and informants (i.e., observer, parent). Relative to other forms of conflict reactivity, children’s distress responses to interparental conflict were consistent, unique predictors of their elevated cortisol reactivity to interparental conflict even after inclusion of demographic factors as moderators and covariates. Moderator analyses further revealed that associations between distress and elevated cortisol levels in response to interparental conflict were particularly pronounced when children exhibited high levels of involvement in conflicts.     

Children’s Physiological and Emotional Reactions to Witnessing Bullying Predict Bystander Intervention

Study goals were to explore whether children clustered into groups based on reactions to witnessing bullying and to examine whether these reactions predicted bullying intervention. Seventy‐nine children (M = 10.80 years) watched bullying videos in the laboratory while their heart rate (HR) was measured, and they self‐reported on negative emotion after each video. Bullying intervention was assessed by school peers. Two groups emerged based on reactions to the bullying videos: The Emotional group (43% of children) displayed HR acceleration and reported high negative emotion, whereas the Unemotional group (57% of children) showed HR deceleration and reported low negative emotion. Group membership predicted bullying intervention, with peers reporting that Emotional children were more likely to stop a bully than Unemotional children.     

Revisiting the Emergence of Young Children’s Literacy: One Child Tells Her Story

This article explores the progression of one child’s literacy from 4 months to 38 months. The emergence of literate behaviour is interpreted in the light of current theories such as those of Halliday and Dyson. One of the most significant aspects of this emergence is shown to be interaction with others in authentic literacy activities, a feature which has a number of implications for teachers and researchers alike.     

A Children’s Author Recognition Test: A Useful Tool in Reading Research

The relationship between exposure to print and reading ability is beginning to be well documented through the work of Stanovich and his colleagues (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1990; Stanovich and Cunningham, 1992; Cipielewski and Stanovich, 1992). In order to investigate exposure to print they have developed a number of measures which are reliable and effective including Author Recognition Tests. This paper discusses the development of a UK version of a Children’s Author Recognition Test and argues the need for developing culturally specific equivalents. A further study shows that a Children’s Author Recognition Test can be used as a tool for double checking self-reports by parents of the amount of reading they do with their children.     

The State of Play: Children’s Oral Culture,Literacy and Learning

This paper looks at the experiences of student teachers in relation to the oral culture of the playground. It suggests that in the year in which the National Literacy Strategy is being implemented, the language and lore of the playground remind us that there are a number of alternative literacies that children have access to outside the classroom. Student teachers recording these, saw ways in which children’s personal literacies might complement school literacy.     

Parenting and Child DRD4 Genotype Interact to Predict Children’s Early Emerging Effortful Control

Effortful control (EC), or the trait‐like capacity to regulate dominant responses, has important implications for children’s development. Although genetic factors and parenting likely influence EC, few studies have examined whether they interact to predict its development. This study examined whether the DRD4 exon III variable number tandem repeat polymorphism moderated the relation between parenting and children’s EC. Three hundred and eighty‐two 3‐year‐olds and primary caregivers completed behavioral tasks assessing children’s EC and parenting. Children’s DRD4 genotypes moderated the relation between parenting and EC: Children with at least one 7‐repeat allele displayed lower EC in the context of negative parenting than children without this allele. These findings suggest opportunities for modifying early risk for low EC.     

Helping the In‐Group Feels Better: Children’s Judgments and Emotion Attributions in Response to Prosocial Dilemmas

Five‐ to 13‐year‐old European American children (N = 76) predicted characters’ decisions, emotions, and obligations in prosocial moral dilemmas. Across age, children judged that characters would feel more positive emotions helping an unfamiliar child from the racial in‐group versus out‐group (African American), happier ignoring the needs of a child from the racial out‐group versus in‐group, and greater obligation to help a child from the racial in‐group versus out‐group. Situations varied by whether the race of the needy child matched versus mismatched that of the focal character. With increasing age, children attributed more positive emotions to people who sacrifice their own desires to help needy others as well as became more discriminating about the situations that call for altruistic action.     

Tracing the Cascade of Children’s Insecurity in the Interparental Relationship: The Role of Stage‐Salient Tasks

This study examined whether children’s difficulties with stage‐salient tasks served as an explanatory mechanism in the pathway between their insecurity in the interparental relationship and their disruptive behavior problems. Using a multimethod, multi‐informant design, 201 two‐year‐old children and their mothers participated in 3 annual measurement occasions. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that coder ratings of children’s insecure responses to interparental conflict from a maternal interview predicted observer ratings of their difficulties with stage‐salient tasks (i.e., emotion regulation, autonomy, resourceful problem solving) 1 year later after controlling for initial stage‐salient task performance. Stage‐salient task difficulties, in turn, predicted experimenter reports of children’s behavior problems 1 year later. Associations remained robust in the broader context of other pathways hypothesized in prevailing developmental cascade models.