Spatial Training Improves Children's Mathematics Ability

Abstract

We tested whether mental rotation training improved math performance in 6- to 8-year-olds. Children were pretested on a range of number and math skills. Then one group received a single session of mental rotation training using an object completion task that had previously improved spatial ability in children this age (Ehrlich, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2006). The remaining children completed crossword puzzles instead. Children's posttest scores revealed that those in the spatial training group improved significantly on calculation problems. In contrast, children in the control group did not improve on any math tasks. Further analyses revealed that the spatial training group's improvement was largely due to better performance on missing term problems (e.g., 4 + ____ = 11).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported in part by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences to the second author and by a summer research fellowship from the College of Education at Michigan State University to the first author.

We are very grateful to the children and parents who agreed to participate in the study.

Notes

*p < .01.

¹We estimated effect size using eta squared (η ² ), which is appropriate for use with analyses of covariance. For this measure, .02 is considered a small effect, .13 is considered a medium effect, and .26 is considered a large effect (Bakeman, 2005; Cohen, 1988).

*p < .01.