This study investigated the effects of 3D model building activities with block codes on students' spatial thinking and computational thinking skills. The study group consists of 5th grade students in a secondary school in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. For the study, a pretestposttest control group was utilized within the experimental…

This study explored the interest, outcome expectations, choice goals and choice actions in engineering and technology, collaboration value, problem solving attitudes, and spatial reasoning and orientation skills of 63 middle school females in grades six, seven, and eight. The participants were involved in a five full-day coding robotics summer…

Background: Coding has been added to school curricula in several countries, being one of the necessary competencies of the 21st century. Although it has also been suggested to foster the development of several cognitive skills such as computational thinking and problem-solving, studies on the effects of coding are very limited, provide mixed…

Behavioral studies have reported interactions between number processing and spatial attention, suggesting that number processing involves shifting attention along a mental continuum on which numbers are represented in ascending order. However, direct evidence for attention shifts remains scarce, the respective contribution of the horizontal and…

STEM integration holds significant promise for supporting students in making connections among ideas and ways of thinking that might otherwise remain "siloed." Nevertheless, activities that integrate disciplines can present challenges to learners. In particular, they can require students to shift epistemological framing, demands that can…

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location.…

Spatial reasoning plays a vital role in choice of and success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, yet the topic is scarce in grade school curricula. We conjecture that this absence may be due to limited knowledge of how spatial reasoning is discussed and engaged across STEM professions. This study aimed to address…

Understanding many scientific phenomena, processes, or systems may be especially dependent on a student's ability to visualize or manipulate spatial information in order to construct mental representations. One instructional technique often included in science texts to help students to understand difficult concepts is the use of concrete or…

This report summarizes the findings across two case studies conducted as part of WestEd's evaluation of the California Statewide Early Math Initiative (CAEMI). The case studies aimed to understand the planning and implementation of professional learning and coaching in local communities. They also examined changes in educators' math knowledge,…

Implementing a play-based curriculum presents challenges for pre-service and in-service teachers given the current climate of standards and didactic pedagogies. This study highlights the value of playful learning and its rightful place in early childhood classrooms for children of all ages. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the…

Events always unfold in a spatial context, leading to the claim that it serves as a scaffold for encoding and retrieving episodic memories. The ubiquitous co-occurrence of spatial context with events may induce participants to generate a spatial context when hearing scenarios of events in which it is absent. Spatial context should also serve as an…

Longitudinal spatial language intervention studies have shown that greater exposure to spatial language improves children's performance on spatial tasks. Can short naturalistic, spatial language interactions also evoke improved spatial performance? In this study, parents were asked to interact with their child at a block wall exhibit in a…

This study investigates the role of perspective-taking skills in how children explain spatially complex astronomical phenomena. Explaining many astronomical phenomena, especially those studied in elementary and middle school, requires shifting between an Earth-based description of the phenomena and a space-based reference frame. We studied 7- to…

Over the past few decades, there has been extensive debate as to whether humans represent number abstractly and, if so, whether perceptual features of a set such as cumulative surface area or contour length are extracted more readily than number from the external world. Here we show that 7-month-old infants are sensitive to smaller ratio changes…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…