Finding opportunities for elementary preservice teachers to engage in mathematics for themselves and to collaborate in their enquiries was the focus of this study, carried out at two English Universities. Preservice teachers on 1-year postgraduate programmes engaged in shared mathematics enquiry, with a focus on growing patterns. We conducted…

The aim of this study is to examine whether the structural model that Sahin and Ates (2020) put forward about the relationship among students' scientific literacy levels, logical thinking ability, cognitive styles, mental capacity, and mental rotation ability differ in terms of gender. A causal-comparative model approach was used in this study.…

This study aimed to develop a valid and reliable instrument, the Mental Images of Scientists Questionnaire (MISQ), and use the instrument to examine Chinese students' mental images of scientists' characters across school levels, regions, living settings, and gender. The final version of the MISQ consisted of four constructs: scientists' cognitive,…

Mental training has been employed successfully by experienced musicians, but rarely explored with younger learners. Considering its benefits, however, including the use and development of predictive, feedforward processes, identified in neuroscience as being central to playing a musical instrument, this mixed qualitative-quantitative study…

In line with the attention-to-affect model, this study employed a game that encompasses Gestalt perception to explore how extraneous cognitive load (ECL) and gameplay anxiety correlate with attitude towards exploitative learning and attitude towards explorative learning as students play the Visual-Saliency game (VSG) with images of artworks. The…

In the core of computational thinking (CT) practices is problem-solving. However, there is little research on connecting CT with problem solving processes. We developed a computer-based assessment on CT that can log students' problem-solving processes and administered it to a group of fifth graders as a pre- and post- measure of a robotics…

Despite the plethora of research in the field of mental rotation, researchers are still divided over a range of related issues, particularly the processes involved in coping with mental rotation tasks. This field of research, for the most part, is descriptive rather than interpretative, leading to the absence of a theoretical framework to enable…

The development of math reasoning and 3-d mental rotation skills are intertwined. However, it is currently not understood how these cognitive processes develop and interact longitudinally at the within-person level -- either within or across genders. In this study, 553 students (52% girls) were assessed from fifth to seventh grades on 3-d mental…

Over three decades of research has shown that spatial reasoning and mathematics performance are highly correlated. Spatial visualization, in particular, has been found to predict mathematics performance in primary and middle school children. This research sought to determine the effectiveness of a spatial visualization intervention program on…

The long-term physical activity in specific sport activities can change the quality of mental rotation performance. This study investigates the influence of "Life Kinetik"--a motion program with tasks of cognition and motor coordination--on mental rotation performance of 44 primary school-aged children. While the experimental group…

Individuals with better spatial thinking have increased interest and greater achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). This relationship means that STEM education may benefit from leveraging spatial thinking, but measures of spatial thinking as they relate to specific…

Awareness of one's own strengths and weaknesses during visualisation is often initiated by the imagination -- the faculty for intuitively visualising and modelling an object. Towards exploring the role of metacognitive awareness and imagination in facilitating visualisation in solving a mathematics task, four secondary schools in the North West…

Although the psychological literature has demonstrated that spatial reasoning and mathematics performance are correlated, there is scant research on these relationships in the middle years. The current study examined the commonalities and differences in students' performance on instruments that measured three spatial reasoning constructs and two…

This case study contrasts the strategies used by two students in solving bilateral symmetry and reflection tasks, based on the differential properties they attended to. The ninth grader focussed on congruence of sides as the main property of reflection whereas the eighth grader focussed on perpendicularity and equi-distance, as is the normative…

This unique volume surveys recent research on spatial visualization in mathematics in the fields of cognitive psychology and mathematics education. The general topic of spatial skill and mathematics has a long research tradition, but has been gaining attention in recent years, although much of this research happens in disconnected subfields. This…