The master's thesis focuses on the syntactic structure of children's drawings across different age groups and how changes in drawing format affect the internal structure of the drawing. At various developmental stages of thinking, we can observe the child’s current understanding of reality and the world around them. A remarkable indicator of a child's current cognitive stage is their drawing.
The research, divided into two parts, first concentrates on the analysis of existing professional literature and established findings by experts on children’s drawings across developmental phases, as well as on the perception of pictorial space and the use of drawing formats. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to empirical research. I conducted a qualitative study involving the observation of 300 children aged between 1 and 15, examining how they redraw a free drawing originally made on A4 paper onto a selected drawing format of a different shape and size. By analysing the copied drawing on a different format, we can determine how the change in format affects the size, position, and orientation of figures or shapes included in the drawing.
Through the analysis and comparison of recurring actions, I found that children of different ages approach the task of redrawing an original drawing onto a format of a different size and shape in different ways. At the sensorimotor stage of thinking, we cannot yet speak of redrawing. When a child enters the symbolic stage of drawing, we may observe either a repetition of the same motif rather than a true redrawing, or an attempt to copy all the figures and shapes from the original drawing onto the new format. During this process, the child does not focus on the relationships between the figures, which leads to distortions or adaptations in the size, position, and orientation of the elements within the drawing. In primary school, children progress first to concrete logical thinking and later to formal logical thinking. In this stage, I observed two distinct final approaches to the redrawing task. The outcome depended on which principle the child deemed more important during redrawing: some chose to include all figures and shapes from the original drawing, while others prioritized maintaining the primary relationships between the figures, even if this meant that parts of the drawing extended beyond the boundaries of the format.
These newly acquired findings can be compared with already established knowledge about the various stages of children's understanding of reality. They contribute to a deeper understanding of children's drawing development and support the design of more effective visual art activities for preschool and primary school children.
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