Since the discovery that children's human figure drawings followed a clear developmental progression with increasing age, they have been used extensively as estimates of intelligence. From its development in 1926, the Goodenough Draw-a-Man Test provided psychologists and educators with a simple mental age score of a child's cognitive maturity. Its attraction lay in the fact that the test's non-verbal nature and brevity allowed it to be used with those whose language skills or attention span was problematic.

In 1963, Harris revised the Draw-a-Man and published his work as the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. The test was normed on nearly 3,000 school children aged between 5 and 15 years who were attending regular school classes. The sample was drawn from 10 states covering 4 regions of the United States; the Mid-Atlantic and New England area, the South, the West and the upper Mid-West. However, there was no control for racial distribution. The tendency for girls to perform consistently better than boys of the same age resulted in the development of different norms for the sexes, but with each having a mean standard score of 100, with a standard deviation of 15 at each age level. Harris also devised different scoring standards depending upon whether the drawn figure was a male or female, with 73 scoring points for a male figure and 71 for a female figure.