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Poster #34 - Growth Curve Modeling of Preschoolers’ Spatial Skills during Spatial Training

Fri, March 22, 2:30 to 3:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Spatial skills are essential for everyday functioning (e.g., folding laundry, cooking) and are related to achievement in STEM (Wai et al., 2010), particularly mathematics (Mix & Cheng, 2012). Furthermore, spatial skills are malleable in older children and adults (Uttal et al., 2013). Even though children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have poorer spatial skills compared to their high-SES peers (Verdine et al., 2014), older children from low-income backgrounds respond with larger gains from spatial training interventions than their high-SES counterparts (Uttal et al., 2013). Thus, it is unclear if younger children from low-income backgrounds also have greater gains from spatial training interventions compared to their high-SES peers. The purpose of our study was to promote young children’s spatial skills during a 5-week spatial training intervention. We examined the growth trajectories of children’s spatial skills given that we had longitudinal data, a necessity for growth curve modeling. We analyzed the changes in scores over time, the steepness of the change, as well as the initial starting points. Ultimately, we want to examine how each child changes over time (within-individual change) as well as between certain groups, such as those who have a higher SES. The intervention was conducted with 3-year-olds (N=187; 96 females; Mage=42.65 months, SD=3.37; 50% high-SES) in Head Start (low-income) and private preschools (high-income). Children were trained once a week over 5 weeks on a puzzle task (2D-assembly task) comprised of different colored geometric forms. We hypothesized there would be group differences in both the intercept (initial starting points) and slope (rate of change) over session on the spatial assembly task, expecting that low-SES children would have a lower starting point than high-SES children. We also expected that low-SES children would have a greater growth over the five training sessions compared to their high-income peers. As predicted and supporting prior work (Uttal et al., 2013), there was a significant effect of SES on the intercept indicating that low-SES children had a lower starting point than high-SES children. However, SES did not impact children’s growth rate during training (see Figure 1). This study extends prior work by successfully implementing spatial training with younger children and providing evidence that the growth rate of younger children’s spatial skills during a spatial training intervention did not vary by SES. However, future research will examine if the results are driven by maturation and experience or if this spatial training is better than a no-training control group in transferring effects to other spatial and math skills.

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