Abstract
Spatial skills are fundamental for mentally manipulating objects, visualizing and remembering the locations of objects and their paths, reconstructing patterns, and recognizing locations from a variety of perspectives. Despite their link to children's performance in mathematics and to later success in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers, spatial skills are notably absent from most educational curricula. This chapter addresses key questions in the field of spatial development: What do we mean when we talk about spatial skills? How do they develop during early childhood? And why is it important to promote them early in life? This chapter reviews the available evidence for these general questions and discusses the efficacy of playful interventions and educational technology to incorporate spatial learning into homes, preschool classrooms, and community settings.
TopDefining, Categorizing, And Measuring Spatial Skills
Creating a definition and classification system for spatial skills has proved to be a daunting task for researchers. To understand why this is so challenging, take a simple example of a piece of printer paper. We can look at the piece of paper and know that it is rectangular shaped. We can also imagine what it would look like should it be rotated, crumpled, or folded. And we can identify where that piece of paper is in relation to other objects, determining, for example, that it is located on top of a printer. These different tasks all require spatial skills to perform. The question then becomes how many distinct abilities are involved in performing these varied tasks. This simplistic example highlights a debate in the study of spatial skills: What exactly are spatial skills and what is the best system to break down such a broad concept into distinct categories?
Historically, researchers have attempted to define spatial skills by identifying distinct factors within a more general construct of spatial skills (Carroll, 1993; Linn & Petersen, 1985; Lohman, 1979; Newcombe & Shipley, 2015; Uttal et al., 2013). Factor analyses and psychometric approaches have yielded mixed results and a lack of consensus on what defines the components of spatial ability, including locating the category boundaries and what to call the components (Lohman, 1979; Mix et al., 2018; Uttal et al., 2013).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Guided Play: Type of play that is a middle point between the structure of direct instruction and free play, where an adult has a predetermined learning goal, but the child remains the leader of the activity and, thus, still has autonomy in choosing what to do.
Educational Technology: The purposeful use of digital technologies to promote active, engaged, meaningful, and socially interactive learning—four “pillars” of learning—in an educational context.
Spatial Language: The use and comprehension of words that describe spatial relations between objects, such as over , or on top of , as well as the properties of objects such as big or small .
Spatial Skills: The abilities to mentally rotate and manipulate shapes and objects, to represent shapes and sizes, to visualize and to remember the locations of objects and their paths, to reconstruct patterns, and to recognize locations from a variety of perspectives.
Intrinsic Spatial Skills: The ability to perceive and visualize the properties of an object and use this information to distinguish it from other objects or distracting visual environments.
Mental Rotation: The ability to rotate 2-D and 3-D objects in one’s mind.
Extrinsic Spatial Skills: The ability to understand the spatial relations between objects or entities, either relative to each other or to the environment.
Playful Learning: An approach to teaching and learning that includes free or child-directed play, and guided play, in which adults scaffold children’s interests and learning.