The relationships between visuo-spatial abilities and geometry performances in school-aged children were examined. A battery of tests assessing non-verbal reasoning, visuo-spatial mental imagery, and academic achievement in geometry (i.e., geometric knowledge and geometric problem-solving competencies) was presented to 162 8-9.5-year-old pupils…

Spatial reasoning, recognised as playing a critical role across STEM disciplines, is gaining prominence in mathematics education, not only as fundamental to mathematics, but also as embodied mathematical activity. In this paper, we discuss spatial reasoning and its embodiment in mathematics. We then present a systematic review of the topics as…

The literature on the association between reading comprehension and mathematics skills is complicated and conflicting. This study seeks to illuminate the nature of the association between mathematics skills and reading comprehension by incorporating potential moderators, namely components of mathematics skills, domains of content standards in…

Spatial abilities--required in both academic and everyday information processing--are recommended as an important target for explicit instruction in the K-12 curriculum. However, most school curricula do not address this spatial issue, probably because spatial ability is a general rather than domain-specific skill and also due to debate regarding…

The purpose of this study was to investigate kindergartners' geometric (shape, area and symmetry) and spatial (spatial orientation and spatial visualization) thinking skills, in the context of gender and age. Whether kindergartners' geometric and spatial thinking skills vary by their age or gender was questioned. A total of 73 kindergartners (40…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

Four- to 10-year-old children (n = 50) participated in a 2D search task that included geometry (with- and without lines) and feature conditions. During each of 27 trials, participants watched as a cartoon character hid behind one of three landmarks arranged in a triangle on a computer screen. During feature condition trials, participants could use…

Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…

Geometry, e.g., the shape of the environment, can be used by numerous animal species to orientate, but data concerning the mouse are lacking. We addressed the question of whether mice are capable of using geometry for navigating. To test whether aging could affect searching strategies, we compared adult (3- to 5-mo old) and aged (20- to 21-mo old)…

Children 3.5 to 5 years old were asked to judge which of several possible sets of parts matched a configured target form and to copy the target forms. Found a significant association between age and performance on the perception task and consistency across the two tasks. (MDM)

Although geometry and spatial reasoning are important as a way to interpret and reflect on the physical environment and also form the foundation for learning mathematics and other subjects, many early childhood and primary school teachers spend little time instructing their students in these areas. This paper examines how young children learn…