The drawings of children and young people with Down's Syndrome: a case of delay or difference?

Abstract

This study compared the performance of 29 children and young people with Down's Syndrome with the performance of 29 verbal-mental-age-matched children without learning difficulties on four drawing tasks and four picture-selection tasks. All eight tasks involved the graphic depiction of a perceptually-present array in which one object was partially occluded by another object. It was found that all participants performed better on the picture-selection tasks than on the drawing tasks, and that the individuals with Down's Syndrome performed significantly worse than the children without learning difficulties on all eight tasks. However, it was also found that the performance of the children without learning difficulties correlated strongly with their verbal mental age, but that the performance of the individuals with Down's Syndrome did not show the same correlation with verbal mental age. Other systematic differences between the drawings of the individuals with Down's Syndrome and those of the children without learning difficulties also occurred. The findings suggest that the drawing development of children and young people with Down's Syndrome may not just be delayed relative to that of children who do not have learning difficulties but may exhibit a qualitatively different pattern.

The human figure drawings of children with Down syndrome

“…The finding that the children with DS, in contrast to the MA children, did not show a significant correlation between their mental age and their HFD score for either of the drawing tasks supports the findings of Clements & Barrett (1994) and their claim that this might indicate a qualitative difference in the development of children with DS and not simply a developmental delay, aview also advocated by Morss (1985) and Wishart (1988Wishart ( , 1990Wishart ( , 1993. The children with DS performed closer to their mental rather than their chronological age controls.…”

“…In addition, the use of this measure also allowed a comparison between the findings of the present study and that of Clements & Barrett (1994). A measure of verbal mental age was used in order to control for the child's ability to comprehend the instructions given for the two tasks.…”

Sequential developments in children's human figure drawing

“…This is a noteworthy line of evidence, given the other differences which have been found by Clements & Barrett (1994) between the drawing abilities of children with Down's syndrome and the drawing abilities of children without learning difficulties. This sequence is exhibited both by children without learning difficulties and by children with Down's syndrome.…”

An analysis of children’s drawings of what they think is inside their bodies: a South African regional study

“…However, when working with young children, who do not have the necessary verbal or writing skills, alternative ways of understanding what they know should be explored. This dilemma has led to a plethora of research on alternative ways of gaining information about learners' understanding (Cerrah Ö zsevgeç 2007; Clements and Barret 1994;Fleer and Hardy 1993;Guichard 1995;Nakhleh 2011;Novak and Musonda 1991;Ö ren 2011;Prokop and Fancovicová 2006;Tunnicliffe and Reiss 1999). Examples of such alternatives are: informal conversations; concept maps; predict-observe-explain approaches; drawings and so forth.…”