The experiment was conducted to assess the effect of ordinary school art instruction in human figure drawing on scores of the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. Subjects consisted of 44 fifth-grade students attending a suburban parochial school who were members of two preexisting, randomly assigned homeroom classes. Both classes were taught two lessons in art by their regular teachers. The treatment group was taught human figure drawing, and the control group had art lessons excluding figure drawing instruction. The Drawing Test was administered three times, one preinstruction and two postinstruction administrations. Absenteeism reduced treatment and control groups to 14 and 17 subjects, respectively. As predicted, no differences were found in the control group between pretest and posttests. The treatment group showed significant gains on both osttests, as well as a significant decline from the first posttest to the seconf posttest.
The Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (Harris, 1963) is a well known measure of children's general intellectual maturity. It consists of the drawing of a man and of a woman. The critical assumption of the test is that the amount of detail included in the child's drawing reflects his level of conceptual development. This criterion is assumed to be independent of his artistic ability, amount of practice, and exposure to art instruction. This assumption is necessary for the test to be interpreted as a measure of intellectual ability rather than achievement, and is particularly critical if it is to be used as a culture-fair test. It is generally believed