Breaking down gesture and action in mental rotation: Understanding the components of movement that promote learning.

Wakefield, Elizabeth M.; Foley, Alana E.; Ping, Raedy M.; Villarreal, Julia N.; Goldin‐Meadow, Susan; Levine, Susan C.

doi:10.1037/dev0000697

Cited by 17 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…Although such training was sufficient to raise children’s mental rotation scores, it might not have been extensive or detailed enough to show transfer to mathematics performance. Consistent with this possibility, a recent study found that 5-year-olds’ mental rotation ability benefited more from training that involved gesturing the rotation than from training that involved rotating an image on a touchscreen (Wakefield et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Effects of spatial training on mathematics in first and sixth grade children.

Mix

Levine

Cheng

et al. 2021

Journal of Educational Psychology

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A pretest-training-posttest design assessed whether training to improve spatial skills also improved mathematics performance in elementary-aged children. First grade students (mean age ϭ 7 years, n ϭ 134) and sixth grade students (mean age ϭ 12 years, n ϭ 124) completed training in 1 of 2 spatial skills-spatial visualization or form perception/VSWM-or in a nonspatial control condition that featured language arts training. Spatial training led to better overall mathematics performance in both grades, and the gains were significantly greater than for language arts training. The same effects were found regardless of spatial training type, or the type of mathematics tested. Educational Impact and Implications StatementWe tested whether children's mathematics scores could be improved with training in spatial skills (like, imagining objects rotating or remembering locations), based on previous research showing a connection between math and spatial skill. We found that spatial training improved math scores for children in first and sixth grade, and it did not seem to matter what kind of spatial practice we used or what specific math problems we tested. Our findings suggest that when children solve mathematics problems, they may recruit spatial thinking to help them, so teachers might use spatial tasks as a warm-up before mathematics instruction, or provide extra spatial practice to students who show weak spatial skills.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Effects of spatial training on mathematics in first and sixth grade children.

Mix

Levine

Cheng

et al. 2021

Journal of Educational Psychology

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“…In older children and adults, spatial skills predict Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics achievement and career paths, even when controlling for numerical and verbal abilities (25,(72)(73)(74)(75)(76). Although there are socioeconomic disparities in foundational spatial skills (35,39), spatial thinking can be improved with instruction and practice (67,77,78). Moreover, training children's spatial thinking improves their numerical math skills (66,67).…”

Section: Foundational Mathematical Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children

Raudenbush

Hernandez

Goldin‐Meadow

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Social inequality in mathematical skill is apparent at kindergarten entry and persists during elementary school. To level the playing field, we trained teachers to assess children’s numerical and spatial skills every 10 wk. Each assessment provided teachers with information about a child’s growth trajectory on each skill, information designed to help them evaluate their students' progress, reflect on past instruction, and strategize for the next phase of instruction. A key constraint is that teachers have limited time to assess individual students. To maximize the information provided by an assessment, we adapted the difficulty of each assessment based on each child’s age and accumulated evidence about the child’s skills. Children in classrooms of 24 trained teachers scored 0.29 SD higher on numerical skills at posttest than children in 25 randomly assigned control classrooms (P = 0.005). We observed no effect on spatial skills. The intervention also positively influenced children’s verbal comprehension skills (0.28 SD higher at posttest, P < 0.001), but did not affect their print-literacy skills. We consider the potential contribution of this approach, in combination with similar regimes of assessment and instruction in elementary schools, to the reduction of social inequality in numerical skill and discuss possible explanations for the absence of an effect on spatial skills.

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“…These data also lay a foundation for developmental work on children's use of theory of mind in gestural communication. A substantial literature has explored the impact of gesture on children's learning: When children are instructed to use gestures, they perform better on math problems (Goldin-Meadow et al, 2009;Novack et al, 2014) and mental rotation tasks (Wakefield et al, 2019). Children's spontaneous gestures can also show implicit understanding of a concept, even when explicit verbal answers are incorrect, signalling a transitional state of understanding predictive of future learning (Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986;Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005;Perry et al, 1988).…”

Section: The Development Of Gestural Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gesture Production and Theory of Mind: Effective Disambiguation in Communication through Gesture

Kim¹,

Schachner²

2020

Preprint

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People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind, accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is this ability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, or does it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whether adults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevant information, representing different features of the target in different contexts. In a two-item reference game, adults gestured to a partner to indicate which object was the target. Item pairs differed in one of three features (size, shape, pattern). We found that adults were more likely to gesture a feature when it was relevant to distinguishing the two possible referents, versus when it was not. Thus, adults flexibly modified their gestures to meet their partners’ needs, emphasizing the relevant feature. These data lay a foundation for future work on the development of use of theory of mind in gestural communication in childhood.

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Breaking down gesture and action in mental rotation: Understanding the components of movement that promote learning.

Abstract: Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience-physically rotating objects-or gesture experience-showing how objects could rotate (e.g.,

Cited by 17 publications

References 47 publications

Effects of spatial training on mathematics in first and sixth grade children.

Effects of spatial training on mathematics in first and sixth grade children.

Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children

Gesture Production and Theory of Mind: Effective Disambiguation in Communication through Gesture

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