Developed by a team of educational psychologists, the Incomplete Pictures Technique is a simple way to engage a student of any age prior to launching a lengthy assessment session. It not only builds rapport quickly, especially for younger children unfamiliar with the concept of “testing,” but also allows the evaluator to preview the student’s intellectual level and any emotional issues that may also need to be explored.

The I.P.T. consists of 10 pictures “that have been started, but not finished.” The child’s task is to decide what each picture is intended to be, and then proceed to complete the drawing. The first three pictures are quite easy to identify (even for preschoolers) -- a person, a tree, and a building. The next 7 pictures are increasingly ambiguous and abstract, making this essentially a projective assessment (i.e., in the absence of clear guidelines, the student must project his or her own world into the task). Thereby, the I.P.T. yields considerable information valuable to hypotheses about the child’s functioning and adjustment, through an enjoyable activity familiar to all ages.

Scoring is done according to a checklist, which takes into account the child’s concrete response mode, ambiguous response mode, figure development, mental creativity, task motivation, and more. Observations of the child’s behavior at specific places, along with the finished pictures themselves, make it easy to complete the checklist for comparison with grade-level, gender-specific norms.