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…

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.…

Elementary students' early development of embedding and disembedding is complex and paves the way for later STEM learning. The purpose of this study was to clarify the factors that support students' embedding (i.e., overlapping shapes to form a new shape) and disembedding (i.e., identifying discrete shapes within another shape) through the use of…

The perception and manipulation of spatial information are essential for mathematical learning, and research highlights gender differences in spatial abilities. The present study contributes to the question of whether these differences are evident at earlier ages and how they interact with task complexity in mental rotation. We developed the…

Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme-phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme--phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use…

We examined whether developing reading skills in the two scripts of Japanese, syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji, had differential effects on underlying cognitive skills. One hundred ninety-one Japanese children (97 girls, 94 boys; M[subscript age] = 100.23 months) were assessed on rapid automatized naming (RAN), vocabulary, morphological…

This study continues an investigation of how spherical units, compared to cubical units, can facilitate students' units-locating and organizing units in composites. We analyze how Norwegian grade 3 students enumerate 3D arrays with cubical and spherical units. Our results show how spherical units can act as perceptual clues that facilitate…

Improving achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is essential for elevating individual success and solving societal challenges. Yet national and international assessments paint a poor picture of students' STEM competencies (NAEP, 2019; OECD, 2018). An untapped avenue to improve STEM education lies in developing…

Multiple studies of recent decades have established close relationships between spatial skills and STEM achievement. Interventions have been effective in providing evidence of malleability of spatial skills and positive impact, yet the inclusion of spatial skills in curricula and policy lags. To date, only limited research has examined the impact…

While symbolic number processing is an important correlate for typical and low mathematics achievement, it remains to be determined whether children with high mathematics achievement also have excellent symbolic number processing abilities. We investigated this question in 64 children (aged 8 to 10), i.e., 32 children with persistent high…

Although there has been profound evidence showing the positive correlation between spatial abilities and math performances, we still know very little about how and why spatial thinking facilitates the learning of mathematics. This dissertation unpacks several aspects of mathematics that are embedded in learning and playing an ancient and rich game…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a mathematics learning disorder that affects approximately 5% to 7% of the population. This study aimed to detect the underlying domain-specific and domain-general differences between DD and typically developing (TD) children. We recruited 9-year-old primary school children to form the DD group via a 2-year…

Spatial reasoning skills are necessary to perform activities at school, at work and in everyday life, in general. Different studies indicate the importance of its development at an early age, since it allows the reading of a three-dimensional world and its interpretation in two-dimensional representations. Our research focuses on the design of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the consumption and production of extended reality (XR) video content impacted elementary student spatial reasoning skills. Third- and fourth-grade elementary students (aged 8 to 11) were given a four-week intervention in which they first consumed virtual reality (VR) video for two weeks. During the…

Parents provide motivational and cognitive support within the same interaction, yet researchers have investigated these separately. We examined two key aspects of parental support, praise (motivational support) and spatial language (cognitive support), from fathers and mothers during three tasks with their first-grade children (6-7-year-olds; N =…