Training Spatial Skills through Directed Play

Previous literature has demonstrated a link between both spatial language and spatial skills and visual-spatial integration and STEM performance in young children. However, these studies examined spatial language and visual-spatial integration separately and did not consider how children’s performance may be differentially impacted when such instructional cues are experienced concurrently, which is more akin to the type of input children receive outside of lab settings. By extension, as previous work has been focused within a single domain and looked at either spatial or STEM-specific skills but not both, it is not possible to directly compare the influence of spatial language and visual-spatial integration on preschoolers’ general spatial and STEM skills. Additionally, there is a general lack of causal studies examining the contribution of spatial language and visual-spatial language to STEM skills that can be applied in the classroom, as most of this evidence comes indirectly from correlational studies or from demonstrating that training these domains results in increased success on spatial tasks, rather than on the STEM skills themselves. The current study seeks to bridge this gap by: (1) isolating the mechanisms that drive spatial training in preschoolers through manipulations across training conditions, (2) looking for evidence of cross-domain transfer from spatial language and visual-spatial integration interventions to both spatial and STEM-relevant tasks that were not directly trained, and (3) implementing a micro-genetic training format that allows for a fine-grained analysis of learning over time.