What is it about?
How are children’s early play and problem-solving skills linked with their later success in mathematics? To explore this, we analysed data from more than 16,000 children in the UK Millennium Cohort Study, following them from age 5 through age 17. Our focus was on spatial skills—in particular, children’s ability to build and copy designs with blocks. These block construction skills reflect how children understand and organise shapes and space. We looked at development across four ages: 5, 7, 11, and 17 years. At ages 5 and 7, children completed block design tasks. At age 11, we measured their visuospatial working memory—the ability to hold and manipulate visual information in mind. At age 17, we assessed their mathematical reasoning, which involves solving complex problems and thinking logically about numbers and relationships. The results showed that children with stronger block construction skills at age 5 tended to do better on mathematics tests at age 7, even after accounting for factors such as family background, vocabulary, and general reasoning ability. Early spatial skills at both 5 and 7 years were also linked with how well teenagers performed on mathematical reasoning tasks at age 17. Visuospatial memory at age 11 partly explained this pattern, but the associations between early block construction and later reasoning remained.
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Why is it important?
These findings highlight that early spatial skills are associated with long-term patterns of mathematical performance. Activities such as block play, puzzles, and drawing may provide opportunities to support spatial skills, which in turn are related to mathematical learning.
Perspectives
This article is closely connected to my PhD project, where I have been exploring the fascinating relationship between spatial reasoning and mathematics learning. I have long been curious about how students' spatial reasoning is linked to later math outcomes, and the Millennium Cohort Study provided an invaluable opportunity to examine these questions in a large, long-term dataset. Writing this paper was also a special experience because it represents my very first publication in the area of spatial reasoning and mathematics. I am deeply grateful for the chance to work with my two wonderful supervisors, whose guidance and encouragement made this journey both rewarding and enjoyable. What excites me most about this study is that it highlights a relatively consistent association between early spatial skills and later mathematics ability, observed across more than a decade of development. I hope these findings will encourage educators, parents, and researchers to pay closer attention to the role of spatial play and activities in children’s learning.
Yuxin Zhang
Macquarie University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From spatial construction to mathematics: Exploring the mediating role of visuospatial working memory., Developmental Psychology, July 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/dev0002035.
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