Effects of Collaborative Spatial Exercises on the Acquisition of Mental Rotation Ability

This study aims to determine whether commercially available games claiming to expand spatial awareness actually increase understanding of mental rotation and whether collaborative learning techniques are beneficial to the learning of mental rotation in this context. To test these questions, 40 children from the CMU Children’s School were randomly assigned to work individually or collaboratively to complete either building block replication tasks or mental rotation block challenges. Four and five-year-old children participated in three training sessions, flanked by a pretest and posttest using the Children’s Mental Transformation Task. Results showed a significant increase in mental rotation ability overall, but the difference between groups was not significant. These results suggest that while the commercially-available mental rotation games do improve mental rotation ability, they are not significantly more effective than building replication tasks that pose fewer overt mental rotation demands. Additionally, individuals working collaboratively did not demonstrate greater improvement in mental rotation. Collaborative Spatial Exercises and Mental Rotation 3 Effects of Collaborative Spatial Exercises on the Acquisition of Mental Rotation Ability Over the past few decades, researchers in the field of child development have become increasingly interested in collaboration (Johnson, Skon, & Johnson, 1980; Fawcett & Garton, 2005; Butler & Walton, 2013). Collaboration is fundamental to human functioning, demonstrated as early as infancy, when children point to obtain an object that they are unable to reach themselves, through adulthood, when individuals form teams to solve difficult problems. Given that collaboration is such an inherent part of human experience, it is important that we understand what collaboration is and under what circumstances it is effective so that we can use collaborative learning techniques to our advantage in learning and teaching. Particularly, application of collaborative learning techniques to the acquisition of spatial understanding has been neglected by current research. As spatial awareness skills have been shown to predict success in fields of science and engineering (Newcombe 2010), working collaboratively to gain this understanding at an earlier age may be beneficial to children’s future success. As defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, collaboration occurs when an individual “work[s] with another person or group in order to achieve or do something” (Collaboration, n.d.). Bratman (1992) describes a very similar concept in his review of “shared cooperative activity,” which he describes as engagement in any activity by at least two people who demonstrate mutual responsiveness, commitment to the joint activity, and commitment to mutual support. Importantly, collaborative efforts produce a joint product or achieve a joint goal. The results of collaboration are understood to represent the shared conclusions of the group (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995). What is perhaps most interesting to researchers is to understand the characteristics that correlate with successful achievement of goals through collaboration. Collaborative Spatial Exercises and Mental Rotation 4 According to Murphy and Faulkner (2000), effective collaboration can be achieved through strategies such as reminding partners of a rule, asking questions, justifying disagreement through explanations of one’s thought processes, and gazing at one’s partner. Ineffective collaboration tends to be marked by disagreement with little attempt to explain one’s understanding, violations of rules, and negative facial expressions. Historically, views of learning efficacy have been divided between two competing theories: Piagetian theory and sociocultural theory. Piagetian theory, established by Jean Piaget, follows what is referred to as an “inside-out” approach to learning (Garton 2004). By this framework, children gain knowledge when their understanding is at a state of disequilibrium with their experiences with the physical world. Piaget asserted that “as a higher level of understanding emerged, through dialogue and discussion among individuals of equal status, equilibration was restored and, simultaneously, cognitive change occurred,” (Fawcett & Garton 2005). Thus, learning from Piaget’s point of view is an internal process that subsequently manifests itself in a child’s outward behavior. Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of learning (Vygotsky 1997), on the other hand, has offered an “outside-in” (Garton 2004) explanation as to how collaboration aids in the learning of novel concepts. Vygotsky proposed the notion of a zone of proximal development, which refers to the tasks that are feasibly achievable by a child with the support of another more knowledgeable individual. Additionally, Vygotsky theorized that intersubjectivity, or the “process whereby two participants in a task who begin with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding in the course of communication” (Tudge 1992), is a driving force behind the process of collaborative learning. Simply put, Vygotsky asserted that individuals must be of differing levels of understanding for a cognitive change to occur through collaboration. Collaborative Spatial Exercises and Mental Rotation 5 Researchers have accrued a large body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of collaborative learning techniques employed by young children. In a study conducted by Johnson, Skon, and Johnson (1980), first graders were assigned to work in either cooperative pairs, competitive pairs, or individually on three separate tasks: a categorization/retrieval task, a spatial reasoning task, and a verbal problem-solving task. The researchers discovered that children in the cooperative condition significantly outperformed children in the competitive condition on both the verbal problem-solving and categorization/retrieval tasks and outperformed the children who worked individually on all three tasks. These results demonstrate that collaboration and cooperation can be beneficial to performance on academic tasks, even at a young age. Phelps & Damon (1989) suggested that collaborative learning is not, however, beneficial when utilized to improve performance on tasks involving rote memorization, but that it can be a successful technique when used to improve tasks that involve reasoning. Spatial awareness is one of many cognitive reasoning skills that is largely undeveloped in very early childhood, and thus I hypothesize that development of spatial awareness may be advanced by collaborative learning techniques. Spatial analysis is defined by Stiles & Stern (2001) as “the ability to specify both the overall configuration of a visually presented pattern and to understand how the parts are related to form a whole,” (p. 158). This ability often manifests itself in young children’s play with building blocks. In a 1988 study on children’s block building behaviors, Stiles-Davis noted that children rarely construct block buildings in more than a single dimension until approximately 4 years of age. This development of dimensionality in building is evidence that children are acquiring a greater understanding of spatial relationships, as they arrange objects within a threedimensional space. Collaborative Spatial Exercises and Mental Rotation 6 The present study will focus on mental rotation ability, one of the skill components within spatial awareness. Mental rotation ability refers to “the imagined movement of an object (or array of objects) in 2or 3-dimensional space” (Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe 2013). Though mental rotation has largely been studied in adults, numerous studies have led to the belief that mental rotation skills may develop as early as four years of age, with significant progress occurring between ages 4 and 5. One such study involved presenting 3.5 to 5.5 year olds with pairs of two cardboard shapes, one that would and one that would not fit into a provided hole (Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe 2013). Children were assigned to receive manual experience (where they were allowed to rotate and move the cardboard piece to determine fit), observation (where children only observed an adult move the selected piece to determine fit), or no experience. Researchers determined that 5-year-olds demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in error rate when compared to 4-year-olds and that 5-year-olds achieved increased response accuracy after both the manual experience and observation conditions. Additionally, error rate for 5-year-olds increased linearly as the angle of the piece’s presentation increased (i.e., less rotation of the piece at initial presentation was associated with a lower error rate), while 4-year-olds maintained a steady error rate regardless of rotation angle. This finding suggests that younger children were not applying mental rotation strategies and that children around five years of age exhibit a readiness to employ mental rotation strategies. Similar results were found by Estes (1998) who presented 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults with image pairs of monkeys who were either raising the same arm or opposite arms. The monkey on the right-hand side was presented at various angles and participants were asked to determine whether the monkeys were raising the same arm. While only 3 out of 20 four-year-olds explained their answers with reference to mental rotation, 15 out of 20 six-year-olds did, indicating an increase in awareness Collaborative Spatial Exercises and Mental Rotation 7 of mental rotation between these ages. Additionally, children who explained their answers using mental rotation did, in fact, perform better on the task, demonstrating an error rate consistent with the use of mental rotation strategies (Estes 1998). Consequently, not only can children demonstrate use of these strategies at an earlier age than was initially believed, but some are even able to identify