Interest in spatial activities predicts young children’s spatial ability development: A 2-year longitudinal study

Abstract

Background: Spatial ability has received vast research interest recently because of its role in STEM education (e.g., Black, 2005; Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). Studies indicated the enormous impacts of spatial ability on STEM achievement and career choices, and potential for both near and far transfer of spatial training effects (e.g., Mix et al., 2017; Sorby, 2009). Despite the importance of spatial ability and its malleability (Uttal et al., 2013), the development of spatial ability in natural settings was less thoroughly examined. Little is known about the factors leading to individual differences in the growth trajectories of spatial ability. Children’s interest in learning activities was found to be a significant factor for ability development in many domains, such as literacy (Dunst, Jones, Johnson, Raab, & Hamby, 2011) and math (Doctoroff, Fisher, Burrows, & Edman, 2016). The current study examined this relationship in spatial ability development using longitudinal data. Aims: The study explored the role of children’s interest in spatial activities in their spatial ability development. We hypothesized that children’s interest in spatial abilities would positively predict both the initial level and subsequent growth rate in spatial ability. Methods: A total of 197 Hong Kong pre-school children and their parents were involved. The average age of the pre-schoolers was 52.72 months (SD =3.30) at the first assessment (T1). Their spatial ability development was assessed individually for four times with a time interval of half a year between adjacent time points over a 2-year period. Spatial ability was measured using a 16-item visual-spatial relationship subset from the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills Revised (Gardener, 1996), which was successfully adopted in previous studies involving preschoolers (e.g. McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002; Zhang, 2016). Their interest in spatial activities was based on maternal report. Mothers were asked to rank children’s interest in various activities from 1 (most interested) to 13 (least interested). Growth-curve analyses were performed to examine the relation of interest in spatial activities at T1 to the initial level and growth of spatial perception ability, with parent-child spatial language usage, parents’ expectation on spatial skills development and demographics as control variables. Results: Among the linear, quadratic, and spline model that have been tested, the spline model best represented the growth of spatial ability. The final conditional model with control variables presented good model fit: Chi-Squared (19, N = 197) = 28.064, p = .082, CFI = .970, TLI = .940, RMSEA = .049, SRMR = .029. Children’s interest in spatial ability at T1 significantly predicted the growth (Beta = .262, p = .034) but unrelated to the initial level. The model explained a total of 24.9% of variance in intercept and 23.7% of variance in slope. Conclusions: The result indicated that pre-schoolers with a stronger interest in spatial activities experienced more rapid growth in spatial ability over time. The finding highlights the importance of enhancing young children’s interest in spatial activities, among other activities, for their spatial ability development.