

Fostering Elementary School Students' Visuospatial Skills and Mathematical Competencies through an Origami-based Program
Effective Years: 2019-2023
The United States has a severe shortage of STEM professionals, and this gap is even more pronounced for underrepresented learners. In 2017, the average mathematics score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 4th-grade English Language Learner (ELL) students was 26 points lower than the average score for their non-ELL peers. The closing of this gap will require interventions that focus on mathematics and on the visuospatial competencies that support mathematics learning. Visuospatial and mathematical competencies are important in most STEM fields and both are underdeveloped in underrepresented learners in the United States. Although there are increasing efforts to develop evidence-based mathematics curriculum and to present mathematical concepts or problems in a visual way, most visuospatial interventions were implemented in a lab setting (e.g., video games; training on mental rotation) and in ways that would be difficult to translate into existing educational settings. Based on research-informed approaches, this project will refine and evaluate an innovative origami curriculum and instructional guides to address the need to enhance students' visuospatial abilities and spatial language and related mathematical competencies. This project will build on an NSF-funded project (DRL-1713547) in which elementary-school students rated purposeful origami as one of the most engaging hands-on STEM activities they have experienced. The project will refine and evaluate the effectiveness, durability, and transfer of an innovative origami-based program on visuospatial skills, with a focus on elementary school low-achieving English Language Learners (ELLs). This study will provide a unique and comprehensive experimental assessment of the contributions of an origami-based program on the development of different types of visuospatial competencies and how the latter contributes to children's mathematical development. The project is a collaborative effort between cognitive psychologists, learning scientists, mathematics education researchers, and origamists that is focused on creating developmentally appropriate and engaging educational interventions and on better understanding the relationship between children's visuospatial reasoning and their mathematical learning. Research results will be disseminated and shared via scholarly research conferences and through publications in peer-reviewed research journals. Furthermore, the professional development protocols developed in the project will provide a straightforward way to scale-up this intervention and help educators integrate this new approach into their practices. This project is funded by the EHR Core Research Program, which funds fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, STEM workforce development, and broadening participation in STEM.
Importantly, this project extends previous longitudinal correlational studies to investigate the causal links between the gains in visuospatial skills and students' mathematical competencies using an experimental design and a 12-month follow-up study with a group of 240 fourth-graders. This project refines an engaging intervention through an iterative design-based research process to help identify the learning and teaching components that can optimally foster children's visuospatial skills. This project will draw on previous research efforts that have examined spatial training effects and includes a comprehensive set of validated measures of visuospatial skills, mathematics competencies, mediators, and confounding factors, which will allow us to examine the complex relations, for the first time, between students' visuospatial activities and their emerging spatial and mathematical competencies. At the same time, the project will identify important cognitive factors and instructional strategies that contribute to the development of visuospatial and mathematical skills among low-achieving ELL students. The focus on this at-risk student group will improve our understanding of how to construct a more inclusive learning environment and will provide clear directions for focused interventions, in order to address the broader goal of preparing more low-achieving ELL student to enter STEM fields.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.