​I​s your child gifted? Their drawings of stick men could tell you

Forget IQ tests. A new study says the real key to finding out if you have a genius on your hands is looking for freckles, goatees and other ‘exceptional items’ in their art

Next time your child proudly presents you with their scribble of a stick figure with crazy hair, it might be worth a closer look: if their drawing includes certain features, you could have a genius on your hands. According to a new study of human figures drawn by children aged seven to nine, there are 30 so-called “exceptional items” that only highly gifted children draw when depicting people.

Previous attempts to analyse children’s intelligence through their drawings have focused on their “drawing IQs”: the number of features and items drawn by a child judged against the average number drawn by children in their age group. This approach, however, is controversial. Not only do drawing IQs give no information about the particular features drawn, but there are doubts about how valid the scores are as a predictor of intelligence. The new study does not aim to measure intelligence, because, according to Sven Mathijssen – co-author of the paper Identifying Highly Gifted Children by Analysing Human Figure Drawings: An Explorative Study – “identifying giftedness goes beyond [that]”.

Related: Would being high achievers make my kids happier? Or should I let them chill out? | Romesh Ranganathan

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from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2wwDhjZ