Constructing a norm for children’s scientific drawing: Distribution features based on semantic similarity of large language models

• Published in: Biology methods and protocols Vol. 10; no. 1; p. bpaf062
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yi, Wei, Fan, Li, Jingyi, Wang, Yan, Yu, Yanyan, Chen, Jianli, Cai, Zipo, Liu, Xinyu, Wang, Wei, Yao, Sensen, Wang, Peng, Wang, Zhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Oxford University Press 2025
• Subjects: Children; Large language models; Semantics; Special Collection: Artificial Intelligence in Biology and Bioinformatics; Word2vec; semantic similarity; children’s drawings; LLM; distribution; norm
• ISSN: 2396-8923; 2396-8923
• DOI: 10.1093/biomethods/bpaf062

The use of children’s drawings to examining their conceptual understanding has been proven to be an effective method, but there are two major problems with previous research: (i) The content of the drawings heavily relies on the task, and the ecological validity of the conclusions is low. (ii) The interpretation of drawings relies too much on the subjective feelings of the researchers. To address this issue, this study uses the Large Language Model (LLM) to identify 1420 children’s scientific drawings (covering nine scientific themes/concepts) and uses the word2vec algorithm to calculate their semantic similarity. The study explores whether there are consistent drawing representations for children on the same theme and attempts to establish a norm for children’s scientific drawings, providing a baseline reference for follow-up children’s drawing research. The results show that the representation of most drawings has consistency, manifested as most semantic similarity >0.8. At the same time, it was found that the consistency of the representation is independent of the accuracy (of LLM’s recognition), indicating the existence of consistency bias. In the subsequent exploration of influencing factors, we used Kendall rank correlation coefficient to investigate the effects of “sample size,” “abstract degree,” and “focus points” on drawings and used word frequency statistics to explore whether children represented abstract themes/concepts by reproducing what was taught in class. It was found that accuracy (of LLM’s recognition) is the most sensitive indicator, and data such as sample size and semantic similarity are related to it. The consistency between classroom experiments and teaching purpose is also an important factor, many students focus more on the experiments themselves rather than what they explain. In addition, most children tend to use examples they have seen in class to represent more abstract themes/concepts, indicating that they may need concrete examples to understand abstract things.