KQED News Mind/Shift – Deborah Farmer Kris
“While boosting kids’ math and verbal skills may draw more attention from parents and educators, spatial reasoning skills play an important — sometimes overlooked — role in academic and career success. And preschool, it turns out, is a key time to foster children’s spatial cognition. Spatial skills encompass far more than having a good sense of direction, according to Nora Newcombe, a Temple University professor who helps lead the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center. They include the ability to read maps, diagrams and charts; to correctly identify, transform and manipulate shapes; to understand how objects relate to one another in space; and to maintain a stable mental representation of an object as it moves.”(more)