Abstracts - Earli

level, and drawing development. Study 1 The aim of this study is to investigate the role played byconceptual knowledge on drawing ability when children are exposed to specific experientialtraining. Participants: 120 children, from 4 to 11 years old, split into two groups: the first groupattended specific training in musical or dance education, whereas the other group did not practiceany particular activity in these fields. Each child was individually asked to produce drawingsrelated with the training’s topic. Results based on the comparison among the performances of‘trained’ and ‘untrained’ groups show a significant improvement of pictorial products of thechildren attending the training. Study 2 The aim of this study is to examine the relationshipbetween graphic ability and metacognitive awareness of control processes in drawing tasks.Participants were 118 children from 6 to 11 years old. Each child was individually asked to draw aperson, keeping up a running commentary of their drawing performance while doing it. Resultssupport the hypothesis that some components of meta-knowledge could influence the drawingability as the higher pictorial performances were related to high levels of Monitoring and ofEvaluation. These results as a whole suggest that an educational context should promote both theknowledge of the drawings’ topics and the metacognitive processes involved in childdevelopment, providing suitable learning paths to support a complete and complex graphicdevelopment.Drawing a person in childhood: an autobiographical approachNora Scheuer, CONICET-Universidad Nacional del Comahue, ArgentinaMontserrat de la Cruz, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, ArgentinaMaria Faustina Huarte, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, ArgentinaMonica Echenique, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, ArgentinaWe explore primary school children’s autobiographical accounts of their drawing of a person. Inan individual interview, sixty children of heterogeneous socioeconomic background attendingprimary grades 1, 4 or 7 were requested to illustrate and describe how they used to draw a personin the past (What did you do on paper when you were just beginning to draw a person? What wasit like? And before that, had you ever tried?). Children were also asked to illustrate their ways ofdrawing a person in some intermediate ages and subsequently: Please show me how you imagineyou will draw a person next year? Finally: What has changed from this drawing (the earliest) tothis one (the latest)? Analysis focused on the changes children marked (orally or graphically)among productions for past ages versus present age, and for present age versus future. Dimensionsof change were: stroke control and use of the graphic plane; referential intentionality; body partsand clothes; part-whole relations; dimensional representation; dynamism; specification andexpressiveness; drawing spatial perspective; mental world. Factorial Multiple CorrespondenceAnalysis was applied to study associations among categories, temporal contrast, school grade. Atall ages, most children marked changes in referential intentionality within the past – presentcontrast. With increase in age/ school grade, children tended to mark more changes in theirdrawing history for body parts, clothes and accessories; part-whole relations; representation ofdimensions; dynamism; specification and expressiveness; spatial perspective; mental world.Besides, when children were requested to draw a person as they would do next year, mostproduced a drawing that was more sophisticated in terms of some of the dimensions considered,thus indicating that they were situated in a zone of proximal development. The verbal explicitationof autobiographical changes in drawing a person augmented remarkably in the eldest children’sresponses.– 510 –