Below are some of our current studies surrounding Spatial Assessments Research! If there is anything more you would like to know about these studies, please check out our Contact Us tab.
Smart Cubes
- Objective: Investigate the strategies that people use to complete the Block Design Task using Smart Cubes
- Summary: Both undergraduates and children have completed our version of the Block Design Task with the SCubes, and we are investigating the process of block building during the task. Current goals are to validate the data from the SCubes with the videos we took of participants, and begin to use that data rather than the video data for analyses.
Children’s Mental Rotation Research Meta-Analysis
- Objective: Evaluate children’s mental rotation test characteristics and how they affect performance.
- Summary: Synthesizing data from studies on children’s mental rotation to analyze how performance differs across different tests and test characteristics.
Spatial (and) Activities
- Objective: Modernize a survey of activities done outside of school, including video games. Investigate how these activities relate to spatial skills.
- Summary: This project used Lookit to have children complete a mental rotation task, a perspective taking task and a spatial anxiety questionnaire. Parents also filled out an activities survey about what their children prefer to participate in. Initial findings showed no real relationships with the activities and spatial measures, so we are doing a deeper dive. Molly will spend the year relating the specific items on the spatial anxiety questionnaire to other spatial measures.
“Stickers” Mental Rotation
- Objective: Evaluate how instructional changes affect children’s mental rotation strategy use.
- Summary: In a previous study, we found that children “flip” the stimuli in a certain mental rotation paradigm. This study tests whether getting the children to think of the stimuli as one-sided stickers would address this erroneous strategy.
Which Fish Fits?
- Objective: Explore how 4.5-to-6-year-old children understand and engage with a matching game.
- Summary: This study seeks to assess how children follow instructions from videos, complete the matching task, and explain their decision-making process. The study is conducted asynchronously and virtually through LookIt, a platform for child-focused research, aiming to gain insights into children’s cognitive processes and problem-solving strategies