There are contentious and persistent gender differences reported in some measures of spatial skills, particularly mental rotation and, to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, which may have an impact on mathematics success. Furthermore, pathways between spatial skills and mathematics may be mediated by other cognitive factors, such as fluid…

This paper considers the teachings of spatial thinking in two Danish school interventions with children, ages 10-13 (2018-2021), by turning Lefebvre's spatial triad into a research-based exercise. Based on children's responses, this paper concludes that, first, by allowing children to include their own spatial experiences, they can resonate with…

A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in…

Insights on students' own authentic design practices--nascent design practices without much adult guidance--are crucial to informing responsive facilitation of engineering design tasks. This study unpacks how elementary students interpret teacher given information about a design task, and interact with each other and given resources, to traverse a…

In many schools across the world, students experience mathematical concepts as ideas empty of wisdom and possibility. In this paper the authors analyze a philosophical conversation in which fifth-grade students were caught up in the animacy of the concept of space. Challenging the common view of mathematics as dealing with absolute truths and…

School curricula as well as scientific literature emphasize the need of understanding how children navigate with maps. To date, however, there is no empirically validated assessment tool for analyzing navigational map reading competencies that can be used in map-based navigation tasks in the real-world. This paper fills this gap by presenting…

Young children often explore partitioning as the idea of fair sharing in contexts where equal parts are created and distributed based on spatial constructs of the objects, rather than enumerating parts or collections. However, the presence of spatial reasoning in children's early fraction experiences is implicit within much of the literature and…

By the end of primary school, children are expected to acquire a range of mathematical skills that progressively develop. This study aimed to gain insight into how a large number of numerical and geometrical measures are grouped and whether the structures shift or remain invariant along child's development based on the data obtained from a sample…

This study examined how embodied learning experiences support students to grasp abstract CT concepts in early primary education. Forty-seven students were recruited from first- and second-grade classrooms. They had five embodied activities that simulated robot programming tasks requiring students to (1) figure out a route from a starting point to…

Cognitive interviews play an important role in articulating the intended construct of educational assessments. This paper describes the iterative development of protocols for cognitive interviews with kindergarten through second-grade children to understand how their spatial reasoning skill development aligns with intended constructs. We describe…

Abstract Lego construction ability is associated with a variety of spatial skills and mathematical outcomes. However, it is unknown whether these relations are causal. We aimed to establish the causal impact of Lego construction training on: Lego construction ability; a broad range of spatial skills; and on mathematical outcomes in 7-9-year-olds.…

In this paper, we investigated the contribution of both cognitive and affective factors to mathematical skills. In particular, we looked at the protective role of self-concept for mathematical learning and performance. In a field study, we tested the relation of math self-concept and short-term visuo-spatial working memory to the mathematical…

Aim/Purpose: This study aims to assess the effectiveness of a tessellation-based instructional program supported by digital technologies for enhancing geometric learning in primary school pupils. Background: Digital education offers various benefits, including increased motivation and engagement, and has been shown to be effective in teaching…

Large-scale spatial representations are rarely a perfect replication of the corresponding environment. Factors such as age, experience and environmental association play a significant role in each person's cognitive map. Yet, traditional spatial tasks remove these contextual elements in determining a person's spatial orientation skill, which has…

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of activities developed on the subject of Moon Movements and Phases on the spatial skills and academic achievement of 5th-grade students. For this purpose, a mixed research method was used. In the quantitative dimension of the research, a quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest control group…