What is it about?
Our study looked at whether watching a short, 4-minute video about spatial thinking could help children solve math problems more accurately, and why this might happen. Spatial thinking means imagining and mentally moving objects, like rotating shapes in your mind. Previous research has shown that spatial skills are linked to math skills, but it is unclear exactly how and why. We found that children who watched the spatial video solved more arithmetic problems correctly than those who watched a picture-word matching video and used fewer counting-based strategies, which are generally slower and less efficient than advanced strategies. Our study suggests that very brief spatial activities can “prime” children to use more efficient approaches to solving math problems, improving accuracy.
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Why is it important?
Our work shows that even a very brief, low-cost spatial activity can immediately improve children’s math performance. By reducing reliance on inefficient counting strategies, short spatial training may help children approach problems in faster and more accurate ways. This suggests an easy-to-implement tool for teachers, a quick spatial warm-ups before math lessons, that could benefit a wide range of students' math learning. The study also clarifies how spatial skills support math, providing evidence for the spatial modeling account and guiding future interventions to strengthen both spatial and mathematical thinking in early education.
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This page is a summary of: The transfer effect of mental rotation training on arithmetic skill: The role of state anxiety and arithmetic strategy use., Developmental Psychology, August 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/dev0002040.
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