Other research has been done to examine how children interpret pictures (interpretation in this sense is a measure of how the students read the picture). Leslie Higgins has done three notable studies in this area (1978, 1979, 1980). The
studies were based on her own model which posits that “. . . picture interpretation consists of two related and interdependent forms of behavior: observation and inference drawing” (Higgins, 1978, p. 216). She goes on to explain that “Inferring in the picture interpretation context carries understanding beyond an awareness of what is seen (p. 216). In her
first experiment with 95 fifth- and sixth-graders, Higgins (1978) found that picture interpretation ability correlated highly with only one factor: operational facility, a characteristic that reflects Piaget’s operational stages. In her second study, she set out to determine whether children can be taught to draw inferences from pictures (Higgins, 1979).