Abstract
Young children love drawing; this is without question. Besides that, drawings are also of interest to scholars and educators, since they seem to provide food for thought regarding children’s conceptual development during their early education. Different approaches are taken when it comes to analysing children’s drawings but insufficient attention has been given to the issue of the spontaneous depictions of symmetrical motifs in young children’s drawings. This pictorial phenomena might not go unnoticed by parents and teachers but the fact is that the scientific community has no reliable data regarding how children under 8 naturally draw symmetrical patterns to express themselves graphically. Accordingly, the present study analyses 116 drawings undertaken by children between 4 and 7 on a well-known natural issue in early childhood such as plant life. Pictorial motifs displaying both cyclic and dihedral symmetries were found in the pictorial sample under examination and the data gathered is put in perspective with the gender and educational level variables. The results of the study show that symmetry, particularly, dihedral symmetry, is a very common pictorial practice in the sample and, also, that the occurrence of symmetrical motifs displays a relationship with the independent variables considered in the study.
Highlights
Creating aesthetic representations is part of the process of the construction and acquisition of knowledge [1]
The pioneering drawings of sunspots depicted by the monk John of Worcester at the beginning of the High Medieval Period [2] or, the microscopic illustrations of a flea that Robert Hooke revealed in his book Micrographia [3], as well as the detailed descriptions of the plants’ sexual system that the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus included in his seminal work Systema Naturae [4], might be among those of the numerous significant examples that spring to mind when reflecting on the connection that graphical representation has with scientific knowledge
The first part synthesises the findings linked to the occurrence of the symmetrical motifs in the drawings under examination, and the second part details the connexion that symmetry shows with the independent variables considered in the study, id est, the gender and educational level
Summary
Creating aesthetic representations is part of the process of the construction and acquisition of knowledge [1]. Is this more apparent than in scientific endeavour. On a separate but not unrelated matter, drawings are a distinctive feature of children’s expressivity [8]. By their depictions and painting activities, children represent their thoughts and knowledge [9] and, not surprisingly, drawing-based research techniques have proved to be useful to gain insight into children’s views, experiences and perceptions about the world around them [10,11]
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