Spatial skills are key predictors of achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, despite being acquired through everyday life and not formally taught in schools. Spatial skills include a diverse group of abilities broadly related to reasoning about properties of space such as distance and direction. Recently, more research has investigated the link between spatial skills and spatial anxiety, defined as a fear or apprehension felt when engaged in spatial thinking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial-emotional competencies are important for school-readiness and can be supported through social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions in the preschool years. However, past research has demonstrated mixed efficacy of early SEL interventions across varied samples, highlighting a need to unpack the black box of which early interventions work, under what conditions, and for whom. In the present article we discuss the critical implementation component of active child engagement in an intervention as a potential point of disconnect between the intervention as designed and as implemented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQ J Exp Psychol (Hove)
January 2023
Tarampi and colleagues (2016) found that females performed better on spatial perspective-taking tasks when social information was present. They interpreted this finding to suggest that adding social information would uniquely improve the performance of females due to their better social perspective taking. In this replication and extension study, we tested an alternative explanation for their results: the tasks with social information also provided spatial information which could explain improved performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMuch recent research has focused on the relation between spatial skills and mathematical skills, which has resulted in widely reported links between these two skill sets. However, the magnitude of this relation is unclear. Furthermore, it is of interest whether this relation differs in size based on key demographic variables, such as gender and grade-level, and the extent to which this relation can be accounted for by shared domain-general reasoning skills across the two domains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeta-analyses from the 1990s previously have established a significant, small-to-moderate, and negative correlation between math achievement and math anxiety. Since these publications, research has continued to investigate this relation with more diverse samples and measures. Thus, the goal of the present meta-analysis was to provide an update of the math anxiety-math achievement relation and its moderators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has demonstrated a link between spatial and math skills. However, little research has examined this relation longitudinally. The present study examines the development of and reciprocal relations between spatial and math skills in elementary school students.
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