But when David Miller, from Northwestern University, looked at Chambers’s original data, published in 1983, one trend leaped out. The Draw-a-Scientist Test has become a classic piece of social science, and has been repeated many times over the intervening decades to understand how children perceive scientists. Often, the depicted scientists exclaimed things like “I made a discovery!” or simply “Wow!” In one memorable case, a third-grader drew a laboratory with a sign that read: “SIKRIT STUFF FOR SIKRIT ENVINSHUNS-SIKRIT.” Their illustrations regularly featured white coats, eyeglasses, lab equipment, and books.
Between 19, the social scientist David Chambers asked 4,807 elementary-school children, mostly from Canada and the United States, to draw a scientist.
