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Qualitative Research Report
Ariana Sherk
University of Missouri

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Qualitative Research Report
This report will contain an in-depth analysis of a students work of art. The
reasoning behind the analysis is to obtain a more complete understanding of why
students create artwork using specific patterns and universal attributed. It is also a
method to determine the exact stage that this specific student is practicing his or her
art in, whether the stages are according to Lowenfeld and Brittain or Kerlevage. It is
imperative that a teacher comes up with an evaluation of the artwork to see if the
student is progressing in their work. It is also a tactic to determine if the student is
gifted or falling behind (Luehrman, Unrath). The piece of artwork I have analyzed
comes from a student in the Gang Age and has attributes from the symbol making
stage and emerging expertise stage, making this student between the ages of seven
to twelve.
Method
This piece of artwork was given to me in my LTC 4260 course. I assume that
a female drew the piece and she is from a Columbia Public Elementary School. There
was no name, date or school identified on the picture so I have to speculate the exact
origins of the artwork. I studied and analyzed the artwork to find the stage this
student in drawing in and his or her artistic abilities. I did this by reading the
assigned readings for the LTC 4260 course and looking up patterns in the picture
that I noticed on the Internet on credible websites. I took these steps to develop
background knowledge of what to look for in a students piece of artwork. Once I felt
that I had attained sufficient resources and information I began to explore the
artwork in the specific and detailed ways.
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Findings
The piece of artwork pictured above displays a multitude of creative
processes taking place. The drawing is of a girl, assumed to be a self-portrait, with a
background of what appears to be grass, a tree and the sky all merging together.
This whole picture is drawn in one medium, lead. The biggest and most detailed
section of the picture is the girl standing in the center.
As pointed out in the Ericson and Young article, students in an ordinary
elementary school classroom are all over the spectrum of achievement for math and
reading, art is no exception. This student could be gifted or falling behind in their
natural artistic abilities but without an age to go along with the picture I would
assume this student was between the ages of seven and twelve. I drew this
conclusion by studying the Stages of Artistic Development. According to the
Lowenfeld and Brittain stages, this artist would be in the Gang Age. This would
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make this student specifically between the ages of nine and twelve. I have come to
this conclusion of the Gang Age stage due to a number of significant factors. These
factors are as follows; the artist seems to have a greater awareness of detail than a
child in the Schematic Stage, there is a physical environment behind the person in
the picture, there is still a gap of knowledge when shading is included because the
whole background appears to be shaded together, there is no baseline, the sky
touches the ground, the person in the picture does not seem to be missing any body
parts or have extra ones, and the figure is clearly a human but appears to be stiff.
Those stages are clearly defined in the text but are also controversial, therefore I
compared the style of drawing to the set of developmental standards outlined by
Kerlevage, written and analyzed by Luehrman and Unrath. Although the age ranges
for the stages are almost identical to one another, Kerlevages stages look and a
much broader view of the child including their cognitive, social, emotional, physical
language, and aesthetic aspects of their lives. In this broader artistic developmental
view, the artist that I am analyzing has multiple characteristics from both the
symbol making stage and the emerging expertise stage. The artist would be in the
symbol making stage (which ranges from ages seven to nine) because the artist used
detail and differentiation, which are both common characteristics of this stage. The
artist also used spacial representation because there is not a single baseline that the
artist constructed the drawing from. The student also exhibited attributes from the
emerging expertise stage (ages nine to eleven) by showing an influence of social
factors and a clear desire to make the drawing look right. The social factor that
stood out to myself was the peace signs all over the little girls shirt. This is clearly a
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sign showing how this girl is supposed to impersonate a kind and peaceful
individual. I have come to the conclusion that this is a self-portrait and the girl in the
drawing is representing her true character and to show that she drew the peace
signs on her shirt. This approach was the way that the artist could portray her own
personality in a drawing. This concept also connects to the Eisner article and one of
the ten lessons that the arts teach, the arts help children learn to say what cannot
be said. This is represented again by the peace signs in the shirt as a symbol to
show her personality without being able to write any words on the picture. The
other attribute from the emerging expertise stage was the picture looks right. The
girl in the picture has the correct number of features on the body and it
stereotypically has the look of a person in a two-dimensional form. The stages that
have been previously listed correctly identify with how this student is progressing
in their artwork at this point in his or her artistic career.
There were seven key principles that Wilson and Wilson wrote about in their
article and the artist that I am analyzing utilizes two of these principles. The first is
the conservation and multiple application principle. The artist used this specific
principle because she used straight shading lines to represent multiple different
parts of her background in the picture. The same type of line is drawn to represent a
tree, the sky, and the ground. The second principle that I found in the drawing was
the plastic principle. This was used in relation to the girl in the picture because she
is portrayed as the biggest object in the picture, even bigger than a tree.
Exploring further into the drawing than the background and the girl as I
whole, I examined the way that her features on her face are drawn. I utilized extra
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resources and found interesting data to further explore the underlying meaning of
the drawing. I have concluded that the face in the picture represents contentment.
This is due to the details that include a round face, a calm look at first glance, her lips
are slightly curved upwards and her eyelids are raised. These were all attributes of a
content face and they all matched up perfectly with the drawing. With an
accumulation of all the data, this drawing is representing a young girl, probably the
artist herself, who is peaceful and content. The main focus of the picture is the girl,
not anything specific in the deeply shaded background.
Conclusion
My overall findings in the analysis of this picture suggest that the artist is a
female somewhere between third and fifth grade. If I were the teacher of this
particular student I would applaud her detail work and her ability to send meanings
about the person in the picture without using any words. Another way I could use
this as a teacher, would be to apply it across multiple disciplines, as it suggests in
Pink. This could be accomplished by having the student do a journal entry or writing
about what this drawing means. I also could have had them implement a specific
background for the girl in the picture to be standing in that could relate to a specific
event or time in history, which would tie in social studies. This projects has helped
me recognize the importance of not only integrating art in the regular classroom,
but for myself to be able to understand what it means. Analysis of this artwork
opened my eyes to different ways to look at pieces of art with a deeper
understanding of where a child should be in their artistic development.

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Rerences:
Lowenfeld, V., & Brittain, W. L. (1970). Creative and mental growth. New York:
Macmillan.
Wilson, M., &Wilson, B. (1982). Teaching children to draw. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.