Critique of any Psy article - Essay Example

Children’s Judgments and Feelings about Their Own Drawing The purpose of the study was to examine children’s own perspective about their drawing. The research has largely emphasized on children’s evaluation of the developmental changes in their drawings as they get older. Previously, there has been no significant research providing sufficient evidence on children’s actual understanding of their drawings and remained a largely neglected subject. The study tested four hypotheses to comprehensively investigate children’s judgment about their drawing.

The first hypothesis examined the improvements in children’s drawing performance with increase in age. The second hypothesis tested the following pattern of metacognitive experiences with drawing performance. Further, children’s feelings before and after the drawing was also hypothesized. Finally, the fourth hypothesis tested metacognitive experiences development with respect to type and complexity of drawing tasks. A total of 222 preschool and primary school children between the ages of 4-12 years participated in conduction of the research.

Out of the 222 selected children, 40 were preschool and 69 were second grade, 65 were fourth grade and 48 were sixth grade children with equal gender representation. Testing involved completion of four drawing tasks conducted individually in their respective schools. Children were provided with white sheets and a pencil, and asked to draw two simple topics of choice and two scenes in which one object was occluded by the other. Metacognitive experiences were measured by rating of a four point scale before and after each task.

Around 90 to 96 percent of agreement existed between the two judges marking the scores. ANOVAs were applied to compare the differences among the hypothesized subject groups. The research results concluded that age has significant effects on overall drawing performance of children. However, the results rejected the second hypothesis of metacognitive experiences. Metacognitive experiences were found to be following different laws compared to that of cognition. A prominent research finding of the study was that feeling of difficulty did not vary significantly among children of different age groups.

However, higher feeling of difficulty was observed with increased complexity of drawing task. It was also found that interest and occupation in drawing declines with age. Apart from other findings, the researchers have suggested that adult’s interpretation of children’s drawing may not necessarily depict children’s way of thinking toward their drawing. As all children have different levels of understanding irrespective of their age, the study fails to identify the impact of individual abilities on overall research results.

The scale developed to measure the feelings of difficulty presents a lack of significant differentiation. Without proper knowledge of the obstacles faced by the children during drawing tasks, it is quite difficult to measure the exact developmental changes and the actual amount of effort they have invested during each task. Researchers have also not stated the encouragement tools utilized to urge children for producing their best drawing. Cultural and socio-economic differences have profound effects on children’s drawing preferences that are also directly influenced by judgment of elders as good, fair or poor.

The study might have produced more precise results if the socio-economic variables would have been considered too. Instead of experimenting with similar tasks, they should have been designed in more detail according to the individual capabilities of each children group for better interpretation of the unexpected metacognitive patterns. While the overall research study can be considered as an unprecedented step forward on examining children’s evaluation of their pictorial productions, the applied methodology needs re-evaluation and further improvements.

The formation and development of metacognitive experiences with respect to drawing also need further research for evaluation of the control decisions made during the organizing, planning and processing of cognitive tasks. References Bonoti, Fontini, and Panayiota Metallidou. “Children’s Judgments and Feelings about Their Own Drawing.” Psychology 1.5 (2010): 329-336.