Research on Child Development: Spatial Awareness and Reasoning
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Last updated
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, 2015
This is a book that has a PDF preview. I ordered the full book
There is evidence that spatial reasoning is learnable, and that it affects mathematical and STEM performance.
What is spatial reasoning?
Tahgta 1989: (1) imagining (seeing what is said), (2) construing (seeing what is drawn or sayign what is seen), (3) figuring (drawing what is seen). A powerful basis on which to organize a curiculum.
Range of dynamic processes: locating, orienting, decomposing/recomposing, shifting dimensions, balancing, diagramming, symmetrizing, navigating, transforming, comparing, scaling, sensing, visualizing.
geometry was stripped away from math learning fairly recently. Industrial-era school focused on arithmetic and formulaic algebra. (No wonder people hate / don't get math?). Consider that "figuring things out" used to mean "picturing in the mind" but now means "workign out a sum".
They want to challenge how math is taught, and make sure their results aren't trivialized by only being used to support entrenched topics.
Check out the "deeply spatial activities of Froebel's original, mid-1800s Kindergarten (Brosterman, 1997)".
Two key facts
(1) "children come to school with a tremendous repertoire of informal spatial understandings that can and should be developed" (Chapter 2)
"spatial reasoning supports mathematical understanding aand problem solving" (Chapter 3)
Video games may be inadvertently educating highly sophisticated spatial reasoning abilities.
Spatial reasoning can be learned but also can atrophy. It can be developed at any age.
Spatial reasoning for young learners - I'm having trouble providing the link. by Sinclair & Bruce. Seems to be from 2012 or later.
Motivation
proven link between spatial abilities and STEM success
kids come to school with abilities that aren't leveraged
increase in available digital technologies. [I would argue, navigation games can do similar and in some ways better stuff due to outdoor, physical components]
This is report from a workshop/conference. More good stuff in here...
2015.
Paywalled.
Includes intervention studies to promote early spatial reasoning.
, 2024
Grade 4 (N=287) students
Interventions to improve spatial visualization skills and math performance
3 treatments (isolated digital spatial training; embedded spatial visualization skills in math lessons; business-as-usual control).
Findings: embedded showed large additive effects; isolated helped with math. Lower initial spatial reasoning students made the least gains in math.
They offered professinoal learning on the importance of spatial reasoning to the educators they worked with. It would be great to have that available for us! ***
Since this is recent (2024), the introductory material summarizing current research is helpful.
Findings that "improvement in spatial reasoning will have positive outcomes for mathematics understanding"
Example: Cheng & Mix 2014: trained mental rotation for 40 min; this improved 6-8yos' ability to complete missing term problems (4 + ___ = 7). A repeat did not confirm transfer to math but did find improvements in 2D mental rotation itself.
Hawes et al 2022 (meta-analysis) - one finding was that interventions that included physical resources performed better.
"When spatial skills training is embedded in real-world, contextually rich activities, the results may be more meaningful in terms of student learning and thus more impactful and transferable" **** !!!!!
They talk about reflection, symmetry, 2D to 3D transformations. The latter is very relevant to interpreting a contour map, or maybe any map (visualization...). I feel like they're missing scale, distance estimation, simplification, landmarks, ...
"Embedded spatial trainign interventions have traditionally been conducted within whole-class contexts or situated within the participants' standard classroom practices, usually by a member of the research team. Although more recent studies have included the classroom teacher in the delivery, few studies, if any, have compared isolated and embedded training under typical classroom conditions."
They mention the "Experience-Language-Pictorial-Symbolic-Application (ELPSA) learning framework", which we should learn about . !!! *** "The framework promoted learning as an active process in which individuals develop understanding through discrete, scaffolded activities using hands-on materials and social interactions."
From 1980! apparently too old to be able to see this article.
Matched groups of 20 10-year-olds
Piaget-based map-drawing task *** I'd like to know what this was!
Assessed 20 separate elements (each a spatial concept applied to a map feature) assessed for developmental level (1-6) *** I'd like to see these!
Scheffé tests for determining all possible comparisons...
Results: suburban & urban groups mean levels of development did not differe significantly; Appalachian children better than one or both of the other groups on 3 out of the 4 spatial concepts.
Conclusion: urban/suburban environments in the US are not optimal for the development of all cognitive skills
Male advantage in mental rotation performance...
Chapter 8 of soem book.
By Rich & Brendefur
spatial reasoning predicts students' later success at higher math like proportional thinking and algebraic reasoning
Describes a study using the --Screener and Diagnostic tool.
Consider the equal sign =. When instruction focuses on procedures and computing facts, students develop a shallow understanding; considering it an operational symbol. Instead develop the flexibility to think of numbers in a variety of ways to establish teh idea of equivalence.
Study: assess effect on spatial reasoning of learning to construct and compare numbers using iconic modeling. (?) Had controls (traditional curriculum). Tested using PMAS before and after. First grade classrooms in 5 school districts.
FIndings: um I think the spatial approach helped?
2015
4 & 5 yo
Spatial thinking task: Located targets presented on maps in a referent space.
Proportional reasoning task: estimate relative amounts of juice and water in a mixture.
Found correlations to proportional reasoning, but only for trials that required scaling.
Conclude: scaling is a shared process between these abilities.
Men outperform women on mental rotation tasks on average.
Gesture training might improve skills on this task.
2023
There is evidence for importance of spatial reasoning for developmetn of mathematics.
Unknown: how this translates into practice
Questionnaire and focus groups with educational practitioners.
Found that they use various activities that support spatial reasoning but don't feel they understand what it is.
theory: language learning leads to mature cognition, with a focus on the domain of spatial reasoning with questions about innate structure and conceptual change.
Early spatial cognition has limits; they talk about how language overcoems those limits
The model is that our minds depend on a collection of modules (domain-specific, task-specific and encapuslated cognitive systems that emerge in infancy and change little after). E.g.: attentive tracking of objects, estimation of numerosity, representation of agency and intentionality. Animals have these too.
We also have generalized systems that orchestrate this info. Eg associative learning and language (unique to humans they say). Language supports interaction across domains by being able to name concepts in any domain and combinatorially link them in phrases and sentences.
They look at the case of spatial reorientation.
See Spelke 2003 for hypothesis that language learning supports development o spatial cognition.
Review literature on spatial reorientation in animals and young children (point: modular)
Many navigating animals can represent their own changing locations by integrating position, direction and speed.
These computations are subject to cumulative errors, so they correct based on memory. "Reorientation". Well-studied.
Food-deprived rats were shown location of food near the corner of a rectangular room with many visual and olfactory cues. Remove the rats, disorient them, and then return them to the room. They equally searched the target corner and the opposite one (same geometric relationship to the shape o the environment). They didn't use the nongeometric cues (landmarks of odor, brightness, scent or texture). Yet they used that info in other ways to guide the navigation. So ... maybe that geometric cue is the overriding one?
Escape tasks engage landmark-based navigation processes more than otherwise identical foraging tasks. Anyway in summary, both landmark-based (associative learning) and shape of environment are used by animals for navigation.
In many studies, rats, monkeys and fish are not easily able to combine geometric with nongeometric features of the environment.
Review studies of older children and adults (point: spatial representations change and show human-unique capacities)
Children, like rats, reorient using geometric features while ignoring salient nongeometric landmarks.
(Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard University is one of the researchers in this area.)
One experiment: subjects watch a toy being hidden in one of the room corners. Then disoriented (spun around with closed eyes), and asked to find the hidden toy. In all-white-wall condition, they searched equally in both corners. When one wall was blue, adults used that as a landmark but kids (like rats) searched equally in both corners.
They further show that the children's failure was specifically when the task required that they use nongeometric features to reorient. They are able to use such features when used as a direct cue to a significant location.
Eg: a xylophone played when they hit a distinctively colored wall. Kids were disoriented and asked to make the music; they went right to the wall. But they still didn't use that wall for reorientation.
Eg: watch a toy hidden in one of two containers with speciic pattern/color scheme. Close eyes & disorient while containers moved. They still searched in the container with congruent geometric location, ignoring color/pattern. But if taken outside the rectangular room, they used the color/pattern cues when the geometric were not available.
Other research suggests that extended surfaces (boundaries?) but not the shape of an array of objects are used to reorient.
Other research suggests that a light source direction can be used in reorientation.
Overall conclusion is that this reorientation module uses large, stable, three-dimensional features of the surface layout. (Think hills and oak trees as opposed to snow patches, lea color, and location of small rocks.)
"It seems that both children and rats can represent concepts like "red wall" and geometrically defined locations like "left of the short wall", but they cannot encode combined concepts like "left of the red wall".
So this all still begs the question: why do human adults perform so differently on reorientation tasks? And, might spatially-challenged adults be trainable, I wonder?
2 new experiments looking at emerging spatial language in uniquely human navigation performance
Background
The hypothesis is that only language provides the syntactic structure enabling a combined concept "left of the red wall".
The age at which children begin to use landmarks to reorient highly correlates with their accurate production of the phrases "left of X" and "right of X"
When adults do a verbal interference task at the same time as the reorientation task, the fail to use landmarks. (Suggests that access to language system is needed.) But when asked to shadow a rhythm instead of words, they succeed in using the colored wall to reorient.
But these aren't conclusive; could be correlative. So - on to the two new studies.
#1: Does verbal cueing enhance children's use of nongeometric landmarks?
Verbal cue "Look! I'm hiding it by the red wall!" Enhanced performance on reorientation task.
Other observations suggest that kids don't truly combine geometric and nongeometric info into a unitary representation of an object's position, but adults do.
#2: Does learning spatial language change reorientation behavior?
To test the causal effect of langugae or reorientation, taught kids "left " and "right" and then tested their reorientation in a small rectangular room with a single nongeometric landmark (red wall). Kids were 4-4.5 yo, just younger than when exhibit landmark-based reorientation - so may be conceptually ready to acquire the necessary knowledge.
Training protocol was based on previous findings for front/back and left/right. First on their bodies and then moveable objects placed at their sides.
2 comprehension games.
"raise your right arm" , "shake your left leg", interspersed with filler commands like "touch your toes"
"show me the object on your left" / "give me the toy on your right", with filler trials asking for something in front or back, or by color.
structure was pretest, feedback training, posttest.
2 sessions about a week apart. 1st session: pretest, training, post-test. 2nd session: posttest, then reorientation task in a chamber. Other kids were only tested on reorientation without the 1st session.
Findings
can teach some kids left and right. Labeled "learners"
Learners searched in correct geometric corner more often.
Controls were identical to the non-learners (who failed the post-test in session 2)
I think they should have first tested the same kids on the reorientation task - we are missing understanding whether the kids really learned left and right or already knew that?