Background

1
The Importance of Gesture in Childrens Spatial
Reasoning. Ehrlich, S. B. Levine, S. C., and
Goldin-Meadow, S. Developmental Psychology, 2006,
Vol. 42, No. 6, 12591268. -- reviewed by
Xiaoqiu Xu, 6/2/09

• Background
• Spatial development has received relatively
  little attention and we do not yet know which
  types of input help children develop spatial
  skills and whether the same input is equally
  effective for boys and girls.
• Method
• 63 preschoolers (33 boys and 30 girls, M 66.80
  months, SE 12.27 days) in greater Chicago area.
• Pretest? Training? Posttest? Probing
• Pretest and Posttest Participants were given 16
  pretest items and 16 posttest items (4 times of 4
  types of items). Each item consisted of two
  target pieces on the pieces card and a choice
  array. The child should select the whole shape
  from among four choices in a array that could be
  formed from the halves.
• Training children were given 12 additional
  transformation items of actual pieces
  (black-colored wood)
• Probing eight probe questions were asked after
  the completion of the posttest to elicit
  childrens explanations of how they solved the
  task.

Results 1. Boys performed better than girls
before training and that both boys and girls
improved with training. 2. Regardless of training
condition, the more children gestured about
moving the pieces in the probing session, the
better they performed on the task, with boys
gesturing about movement significantly more (and
performing better) than girls. 3. Implication
Gesture training may be particularly effective in
improving childrens mental rotation skills.

• Strength
• Focused on the probing session from which they
  discovered the relationship between gesture and
  spatial development
•  
• Weakness
• Correlation not Causality
• There were overlapped shapes in the training and
  posttest. Students performed in the posttest
  might be due to they remember the shapes instead
  of development in spatial reasoning.