ABSTRACT
It was very clear to the early investigators of children’s drawings that as children get older they add more body parts to their figures and the proportions become more realistic. It also seemed to be the case that the more intellectually able children went through this process at an earlier age. At the beginning of the twentieth-century psychologists such as M.C. Schuyten (1904) had experimented with the possibility of devising a test of intelligence based on children’s drawings, and slightly later Georges Rouma (1913) detailed a set of developmental stages specifically relating to children’s human figure drawings. It was not until 1926, however, that the first ‘test’ was published. This was Florence Goodenough’s Draw-a-Man test, initially based on the human figure drawings of nearly 4,000 children. Goodenough selected the man as the topic of the drawing since at that time there was greater uniformity in men’s clothing as opposed to women’s or children’s. The Draw-a-Man test was updated by Dale Harris in 1963. Since that time Elizabeth Koppitz (1968) has also devised a similar kind of test, as has Jack Naglieri (1988). A recent survey of psychologists in the USA has found that these tests based on human figure drawings are among the top 10 assessment instruments (Brcher, Maruish, Imhof and Piotrowski, in press). One of the attractions is that they are quick to administer. Also they can be given to groups, at least with older children. Further, it is believed that because of their non-verbal nature they may be less biased than many other tests, an important consideration when assessing children from different ethnic backgrounds.
