Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test: Updated Draw-A-Man + Draw-A-Woman

About the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test

By the late 1950s the Goodenough Draw-A-Man Test (1926) was still widely used in clinical practice but its 1926 norms had become obsolete. The Flynn effect alone meant that the average drawing produced by a 7-year-old in 1960 was more sophisticated than the average drawing produced by a 7-year-old in 1926. Dale Harris at the University of Minnesota set out to update Goodenough's classic test.

Harris's 1963 revision had three improvements. First, he updated the scoring rubric to reflect 50 years of accumulated normative data, with separate norms for boys and girls and updated developmental expectations. Second, he added a parallel Draw-A-Woman task; the combined Man + Woman score is more reliable than either alone. Third, he provided clearer scoring criteria and examples to reduce inter-scorer variability (always a challenge with drawing tests).

The Goodenough-Harris remained in widespread clinical use through the 1980s and is still occasionally used today as a brief non-verbal cognitive screening tool. It is particularly valuable for assessing children with severely limited language or autism spectrum conditions where verbal testing is difficult. Modern instruments like the Bracken School Readiness Assessment and Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (Beery VMI) have largely replaced it in clinical practice, but the Goodenough-Harris remains a useful historical and clinical reference.

The 3 subtests

Sample Items (Illustrative)

The test asks participants to create drawings based on simple prompts, which are then scored on various criteria such as detail, proportion, and realism. The scoring is based on a rubric that evaluates specific features and overall quality.

These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Florence Goodenough & Dale Harris (1963). Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test.

The 1963 Harris revision is under Pearson copyright (Harcourt Brace published it; rights subsequently transferred). The original 1926 Goodenough Draw-A-Man is public domain. We document the 1963 revision and its significance.