Journal
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Volume 47, Issue -, Pages 133-145Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.04.001
Keywords
Spatial Scaling; Development; Discrimination scaling task; Relative scaling strategies
Funding
- Bloomsbury Colleges Ph.D. Scholarship Programme
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- National Centre for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) Ireland
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Spatial scaling is the ability to transform distance information between shapes of differing sizes. Research on the developmental trajectories of spatial scaling beyond the pre-school years has been limited by a lack of suitable scaling measures for older children. Here we developed an age appropriate discrimination scaling task, and demonstrated that children (N = 386) achieve performance gains in spatial scaling skills between 5 and 8-years-of-age, after which no significant improvements were found. Furthermore, the results support the use of relative distance strategies for task completion. These findings contrast to localisation paradigms, where performance reaches a plateau by age 6 and mental transformation strategies are used for scaling. The finding that scaling skills continue to develop until 8 years highlight the potential of scaling interventions in the early primary school years. Such interventions may infer direct benefits on spatial thinking and indirect advantages for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) achievement.
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