A Parent-Led Spatial Activities Intervention

• In Event: The What and How of Parents’ Socialization: Exploring the Bridging Role of Children’s Psychological Processes

Abstract

Greater exposure to spatial activities at home during childhood is associated with better spatial skills (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015; Levine et al., 2012) which are in turn associated with STEM learning more broadly (Atit et al., 2021). Importantly, experimental work shows that spatial skills are malleable (Uttal et al., 2013). Parents play an important role in their children's early cognitive development, and variations in the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions relates to children's language, literacy, math, and spatial skills (e.g., Goldin-Meadow et al., 2014; Lefevre et al., 2009). However, we currently lack experimental evidence that exposure to home spatial activities improves spatial skills. In this study, 80 4- and 5-year-old children and their parents were randomly assigned to two conditions: either receiving activities with spatial affordances (e.g., blocks, puzzles; experimental condition) or activities designed to promote narrative development (e.g., picture books, story cards; control condition). Parents were instructed to use the activities for at least one hour every week for one month and were told about the importance and malleability of spatial or narrative skills before beginning the intervention period. Parents’ domain-specific motivational beliefs, children’s mental rotation, spatial vocabulary, and narrative skills were assessed before and after the intervention.
We ran three ANCOVAs with post-test child mental rotation, spatial vocabulary, and parent motivational beliefs as the dependent variables, condition as the independent variable, and pre-test measure, child age, and child gender as covariates. There was no significant difference in post-test mental rotation between conditions (F(1, 75) = 0.02, p = .88, 𝜂𝑝2 < 0.01) and, surprisingly, children in the control condition had greater post-test spatial vocabulary than children in the spatial activities condition (F(1, 75) = 5.47, p = .022, 𝜂𝑝2 = 0.05). Further, parents in the spatial activities condition did not show greater motivational beliefs in the spatial domain (beliefs about child ability, child interest, and the importance of child ability) post-intervention than parents in the control condition (F(1, 75) < .001, p = .95, 𝜂𝑝2 < 0.01).
Our intervention did not show a significant impact on children’s spatial skills and vocabulary. Our findings are surprising given prior research showing an association between home spatial activities engagement in early childhood and spatial skills, as well as in-lab spatial training studies. One possibility is that children in our sample may have already been in a spatial-activity-rich environment, and additional exposure to spatial activities during the intervention may not have a significant impact. In line with this explanation, our sample was affluent with high levels of parent educational attainment (n=60 families, annual income: M = $92,250, SD = $19,745; parent education: M = 17.36 years, SD = 1.21). Another possibility is that parents did not engage with their children on spatial tasks in the way we expected. We are currently examining 5-minute videos parents took of their child’s play each week to investigate this explanation. Future work could study how parents tend to engage with their children on spatial activities and build on this investigation to improve parent-led activities interventions.

Authors

• Grace Bennett-Pierre, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jing Tian, Fordham University

• Nadia Tavassolie, Temple University

• Xinhe Zhang, Indiana University

• Emily D’Antonio, West Virginia University

• Lexi Sylverne, Rutgers University

• Nora Newcombe, Temple University

• Marsha Weinraub, Temple University

• Annemarie H. Hindman, Temple University

• Kristie Newton, Temple University

• Elizabeth A. Gunderson, Indiana University