Give The Girls A Chance: Should Spatial Skills
Training Be Incorporated Into The Curriculum?
Author(s)
S. Jones & G. Burnett
Abstract
Recently, tests for spatial reasoning skills were introduced in the UK for young
children. However, effort is still directed at improving reading and mathematics,
with no defined inclusion of spatial skills training in the curriculum. This is a
cause for concern given that spatial skills are important for a range of
ICT-related activities—for example, navigating Web sites. Furthermore, such
abilities have implications for future subject and career choices. There are
well-documented individual differences in spatial skills, with gender being one
of the most studied. The current study aimed to determine if short-term training
with online 2-D or 3-D spatial puzzles resulted in a greater increase in spatial
skills compared to a control group trained with word puzzles. The study,
involving 168 children between the ages of 6 and 11 years, investigated the
impact of the dimensionality of puzzles, as well as gender, age and starting
spatial score. Additionally, the children were questioned on the length of time
they spent on computers, and their preferred computer-related pastimes. The
results showed a trend for higher spatial scores after training with spatial puzzles
compared to the control group, although these results did not reach statistical
significance. Younger children demonstrated a greater increase than older
children, this age trend being greater amongst the females. Those with lower
starting spatial scores showed a significantly greater increase in spatial scores
after training. As expected, males reported playing computer games more
frequently than females. Furthermore, there was evidence that children with
higher spatial scores were actively choosing to play computer games more than
other ICT pastimes such as emailing. Based on these findings, a provisional
recommendation is made that spatial skills training should be incorporated into
the curriculum.
Keywords: spatial skills, gender differences, children, education.
Keywords
spatial skills, gender differences, children, education.
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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