A Study of Children’s Drawings of Their Classrooms

Abstract

This report summarizes a large scale study of children's drawings of their classrooms conducted by the Toronto Board of Education. The drawings were collected under standardized conditions from junior kinder garten to grade 4. A taxonomic approach to the drawing content through an objective coding framework is described and summaries of ad hoc examinations of the data are given along with experimentation involving the actual drawings. The discussion suggests that the findings of the study are parallel to those in the literature on children's drawings as a whole, namely, that measures of skill of execution (drawing intelligence) are more stable and reliable than measures of inferred mood, attitude, or personality. A RECENT article in this Journal by Greger sen and Travers (5) drew attention to the fact that Relatively few studies have explored the perceptions which elementary school pupils have of their classrooms and their teachers. The article, however, confined itself to a consideration of the child's perception of his teacher as inferred from drawings by two judges on the basis of a preestablished coding framework. The present report seeks to provide information on the other aspect of school perception to which attention was drawn by these authors, namely the child's view of his or her classroom. Despite a careful search of the voluminous literature on children's drawings, the senior au thor (14) and two of his predecessors in the Research Department of the Toronto Board of Education (2, 9) have failed to find reference to any previous research on children's drawings of their classrooms. Consequently, an exploratory as opposed to an hypothetico-deductive approach was adopted. The coding of the drawings, analyses of the differential occurrence of these codes in various groups, and other experimentation were evolved based on experience (see 17 for example).