Cognitive Development in School Context • Children's Drawing

A tadpole picture is one of the first steps before  young children learn to draw conventional pictures. It consists of a circle with a face and at least two lines coming out of it, sometimes four. The circle may represent the head and body combined, where the lines are arms and/or legs. A question in child development asks why children first draw pictures this way.

A common explanation for the ubiquitous tadpole stage is that children are merely trying to symbolize a person and do not put a premium on realism.  While this may be true, it does not explain the specific tadpole form. This work examines a more perceptual explanation:  when children look down at their bodies, they see their arms coming from their head. (Stretch your arms to the side and then look down.) Therefore, early on, children draw pictures combining their head and body as one component. Because children assimilate their environment to what they see and know about themselves, they will draw all humans and animals in this tadpole manner. This implies that children are more perceptually driven in their drawings from the way they see themselves and not from the way they see their environment. As they slowly accommodate what they see in their environment to what they know about themselves, this perception will change.

Since animals are quite different from themselves and other humans, children will realize how to draw animals correctly first. The test of this hypothesis is that children will first draw animals more advanced and correct than other people and themselves, and they will first draw other people more advanced and correct than themselves. The results of this work have found that children progress from drawing tadpoles to conventional figures in predictable phases and do draw animals more advanced and correctly first. However, perhaps due to the cross-sectional design of the work,  we have not found evidence of a definite distinction between children drawing other people and themselves as more advanced and correct. We are currently conducting a longitudinal study to get a better glimpse of how individual children evolve in their drawing abilities. The figures show the types of drawings that children make and below plots the relative sophistication of their drawings of themselves, others, and animals.

TADPOLE POINT SYSTEM

Category Points Description Picture
Pre-Tadpole 0 -drawing but cannot make out the picture
1 -face only
-face and feet
-face and feet one line
Tadpole 2 -legs only, no arms, no face
3 -legs only and face
-rainbow picture – no head/body closure but face, arms, and legs
4 -arms (from head), legs, and face
-rainbow picture – closed face, arms and legs
-sun-like with arms and legs
Transitional 5 -face, line for body, arms, legs (only legs for animal)
-two attached shapes
6 -head, body, legs as one appendage
-head, one large body/leg appendage, arms from head
-head, rectangle, line through rectangle
7 -face, body, legs, no arms
-head, body, legs, arms from head
Conventional 8 -face, body, arms, legs
-face, body, legs (animal)
9 -head and body attached by neck, legs only
10 -head and body attached by neck, arms, legs

 

GRAPHS

1. Self vs. Animal


Scatterplot showing the children’s scores of Self and Animal using the Tadpole Point System.

2. Other vs. Animal


Scatterplot showing the children’s scores of Other and Animal using the Tadpole Point System.

3. Self vs. Other


Scatterplot showing the children’s scores of Self and Other using the Tadpole Point System.