The Relationships between Creativity, Drawing Ability, and Visual/ Spatial Intelligence: A Study of Taiwan’s Third-Grade Children

Li-Ming Liu, National Ping-Tung University of Education, Taiwan. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Li-Ming Liu, the Department of Visual Arts, National Ping-Tung University of Education, No. 4-18 Ming Shen Road, Ping Tung 900, Taiwan. e-mail: [email protected] or zoesony @hotmail.com sensibility during the elementary school years (Rosenblatt & Winner, 1989). In Gardner’s 1980 study of the significance of children’s drawings, he argued that “the age of artistic expressiveness, or at least its original flowering, seemed at an end” sometime around age seven or eight (as cited in Baer, 1996, p. 927). The implementation of the Gifted and Talented Children Act of 1978 in the United States greatly improved state and federal support for artistically talented students. Nevertheless, school leaders have been concerned about what might be done to help children develop their artistic abilities. In the literature, theories have been developed in the areas of creativity, drawing ability, and visual/spatial intelligence (Torrance, 1970, 1988; Clark & Zimmerman, 1984; Gardner, 1983, 1994, 2006). One or two of these The Relationships between Creativity, Drawing Ability, and Visual/ Spatial Intelligence: A Study of Taiwan’s Third-Grade Children