Associations of 3-year-olds’ Block-building Complexity with Later Spatial and Mathematical Skills

ABSTRACT

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and mathematical skills or have considered how children go about copying the model in detail. This study coded 3-year-olds’ (N = 102) block-building behaviors and structural complexity on 3-D trials of the Test of Spatial Assembly (TOSA). It explored whether individual differences in children’s building behaviors and the complexity of their designs related to accuracy in copying the model block structures or their spatial and mathematical skills at ages 4 and 5. Our findings reveal that block-building behaviors were associated with concurrent and later spatial skills while structural complexity was associated with concurrent and later spatial skills as well as concurrent mathematics skills. Future work might teach children to engage in the apparently successful block-building strategies examined in this research to evaluate a potential causal mechanism.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nora Newcombe, Nancy Jordan, and Marcia Halperin for their consultation on this project. We would also like to thank Natalie Brezack; the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development Lab; and the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center’s Spatial Network for their assistance at various stages of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This longitudinal study was funded by the National Institutes of Health Stimulus Grant 1RC1HD063497-01, the National Science Foundation via the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SBE-1041707), and the Institute of Education Sciences through Grant R305A140385--all awarded to RMG and KHP.