Comparison of human figure drawings by the students with mild intellectual disabilities and by the mainstream students

Drawing is a child’s way of communicating with the surroundings. With each artistic piece, the child expresses himself, but at the same time, artistic expression is the demonstration and acquisition of new skills. The development of children’s drawings is connected to their cognitive development and proceeds through certain phases (from the scribbling phase, followed by the symbol phase to the realistic phase). At the symbolic phase the child starts to draw schemes, which represent objects. This is also when the child's drawing of the human figure, which he most often draws in the symbolic phase, begins to develop. The child's drawing of the human figure can also be linked with his intellectual maturity, as children with mild intellectual disabilities also show delayed development in the area of drawing the human figure. Although the essence of the child’s artistic expression is not a quantitative measurement of artistic achievements, pedagogues' awareness of the differences in the artistic expression of pupils with mild intellectual disabilities compared to pupils in regular primary schools can help to make the achievement of the child's artistic expression goals more effective and personalised. The research for this Master's thesis aimed to find out what differences occur in the drawing of the human figure between pupils with mild intellectual disabilities and those with typical development. The sample consisted of 13 pupils, 6 pupils attending the adapted programme of a lower-education standard primary school – LES (3 pupils from grade 3 and 3 pupils from grade 6) and 7 pupils attending a regular primary school – RPS (4 pupils from grade 3 and 3 pupils from grade 6), who formed the groups within which the empirical material was collected. In each group, 2 meetings were held in the same month, one week apart. The pupils in each group drew two drawings - a drawing of a standing human figure and a human figure in motion from memory (first meeting) and a drawing of a standing human figure and a human figure in motion after direct observation and with prior awareness of certain features of the human figure (second meeting). The drawings of the pupils, who were divided into 4 groups (RPS3, LES3, RPS6 and NIS6), were scored using the Human Drawing Test (Goodenough, 1926) and then each drawing was qualitatively analysed. When analysing the results, we can observe differences between the average scores on the Human Drawing Test for Drawing 1 and Drawing 2 between RPS3 and LES3. We did not observe any significant differences between the average scores on Drawing 1 and Drawing 2 between the RPS6 and NIS6 groups. For the younger pupils (grade 3), we found that the complexity of the drawing varies according to the primary school programme (RPS or LES) that the pupil attends. For older pupils, the difference is not so evident (grade 6), which could be attributed to a more formed artistic expression that influences the way they draw. The differences between the drawings are therefore more individual and less obvious when comparing groups of pupils with typical development and those with mild intellectual disabilities. For three out of four pupils in the RPS3 group, the progress in Drawing 2 in terms of the representation of the figure in motion compared to Drawing 1 is noticeable, while a smaller progress can only be observed for one out of three pupils in the LES3 group. However, for all pupils in both RPS6 and NIS6 groups, this progress is clearly visible. Similar improvements can be found in the drawings of the RPS and LES pupils, some of which are completely individual and are explained in detail in the individual analyses and interpretations of the drawings