Spatial language enables us mentally represent objects and understand where objects are in relation to each other. Spatial skills are important for cognitive development and academic achievement. Research has repeatedly shown mastery of spatial language skills that include descriptions of position (e.g., in front of, behind, to the right/left) are significantly correlated with children's basic numerical skills.
A study in a special issue of Learning and Instruction, researchers sought to be the first to explore how teaching spatial language skills can impact children’s basic math skills. They trained small groups of children ages 4 to 6 years old for 20 minutes, twice a week for 3 weeks. The training aimed to help participants use and understand spatial terms in front of, behind, to the left, and to the right. It also looked at how understanding affects their ability to grasp numbers and improve their verbal skills with numbers.
Researchers hypothesized that children receiving training would improve their use and understanding of spatial terms, relative numerical size and verbal number skills more strongly than the non-trained control group.
Indeed, in terms of performance, when the researchers compared the training group to the control group before and after the tests, they found that the training group made much greater improvements using and understanding spatial language and numerical concepts however they found no significant difference in children's verbal number skills.
Researchers proposed that their findings are the first to show a direct connection between how well children understand spatial language and how they develop their understanding of numbers. This highlights how important it is for young children to master spatial language to help them with math in their early years.
StepUp Note
Research consistently shows that vocabulary has a significant helpful impact on learning. Here we see that training children to demonstrate “the language of math” (left, right, behind, in front) improved their performance on other basic math skills (counting, counting backwards, and naming numbers). StepUp exercises also focus on basic math movement skills such as “shoe foot” exercises for helping children learn left/right differences, and “seeing number sets” for seeing numbers as a quantity, instead of having to count objects one by one. StepUp math exercises also develop math fluency, helping children turn math skills into tools for new learning.
Note by Nancy W. Rowe, MS, CCC/A