Block building activities help develop students' spatial reasoning, but few studies focus on the development of block building skills beyond preschool. We worked with four kindergarten, four first grade, and four second grade students to learn more about their Lego block building. We compared students' accuracy, building strategies, and spatial…

The effects of prior encodings of manipulatives (red and blue plastic chips) on children's ability to use them as representations of quantity were tested. First graders (N = 73) were assigned to four conditions in which the encoding of plastic chips was experimentally manipulated. All children then participated in an addition activity that relied…

Seven-year-olds who had difficulty understanding 1st-grade work received one of two forms of small-group instruction. Half of the children were randomly assigned to receive four months of instruction in recognizing, comprehending, and reproducing both logical and arbitrary patterns (sequences) involving numbers, letters, shapes, colors,…