Enhancing student’s spatial reasoning skills with a robotics intervention
Date
2021-12-20
Authors
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Publisher
North American Chapter of the International Group for the Physchology of Mathematics Education
Abstract
Spatial reasoning is a high-impact topic as it strongly predicts interest in, appreciation of, and
success in STEM domains and careers. Yet, spatial reasoning is often under-used, underdeveloped,
and ignored in current grade-school curriculum and teaching. Framed by the perspective of
embodied cognition, our study explores changes in elementary students’ spatial reasoning skills after
participation in either a short-term or a long-term robotics intervention. We administered measures
of spatial reasoning elements before and after two differently structured robotics interventions to
students aged 9-10 years: a short-term (N=11) and two long-term (N=48). Statistical analysis
revealed significant improvements to several different elements of spatial reasoning in both groups.
Our findings suggest that programming robots in either the short- or long-term leads to
improvements in spatial reasoning.
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Citation
Francis, K., Rothschuh, S., & Davis, B. (2020). Enhancing student’s spatial reasoning skills with a robotics intervention. In the Proceedings of the 42nd meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Mazatlan, Mexico.