INVESTIGATING SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Marianna Tzekaki and Andreas Oikonomou

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

This study explores the development of spatial representations in pre-school children. A

sample of 30 children from 4.5 to 5.5 year old were selected from different
kindergarten classes and examined individually in originally designed spatial tasks. The
children were invited to observe, one by one, two dimensional Lego configurations and
retain their characteristics in order to reconstruct them from memory. The analyses of
the children’s reconstructions demonstrate a continuous improvement of their spatial
thinking and provide interesting information about the spatial characteristics they
retain mentally when they attempt to copy a spatial situation.
INTRODUCTION
The development of spatial thinking attracts the interest of many early childhood
mathematics programs. The spatial oriented activities are considered, not only as an
important source of conceptual development, but also as a necessary support for the
improvement of the children’s mathematical thinking in general (Diezmann & Watters,
2000). The significance but also the particularity of the spatial sense is demonstrated
by its identification as a special dimension of intelligence (spatial intelligence), which
defines an ability to perceive the spatial world and mentally represent it accurately.
Based on these considerations, the current study attempts to examine the
development of spatial sense in early childhood, by analyzing children’s performances
in tasks that involve arrangements of spatial elements. The research dealing with this
issue has generally a psychological orientation (Case & Okamoto, 1996; Siegler, 1998;
Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000), while our study attempts to approach the ways
young children process the spatial information focusing mainly to its mathematical
characteristics.
The data reported here derive from a wider research concerning the development of
spatial sense in early childhood which consists of two parts. The first part studies this
development and some of its evidence will be presented in this paper, while the
second part focused on experimentation with spatial activities for the improvement of
spatial representations in early childhood (Ikonomou & Tzekaki, 2005).
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The spatial representations are mental construction related to spatial information:
objects, shapes, orientation, location and spatial properties, relations and
transformations (Owens, 2002). This mental construction, as a process and as a result,
depicts the world (objects and facts) in the individual’s mind facilitating its
functionality. Most of the children’s interaction with the natural and social
environment requires the use of appropriate spatial representations necessary for
handling and facing spatial situations (Fuys, & Liebov, 1992).
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In the relative literature, there are several approaches concerning the development of
spatial sense and spatial representations. Following Piaget’s legacy with its dominant
topological primary thesis, several psychological researches investigated the
development of young children’s conceptions of space in different ways (using
children’s drawings, figures or constructions) suggesting that the different aspects of
spatial knowledge are developed with age. More specifically, some research supports
that the children before 6 years are unable to successfully coordinate spatial
information related to two different reference systems (Case & Okamoto, 1996).
However, other researchers, like Siegler (1998), disagree with this uniformity and
argue that, depending on the situation, children adopt more than one spatial
approaches. The research of Newcombe & Huttenlocher (2000) reports on many
aspects of the spatial development in early childhood investigating a variety of spatial
situations like: position in space related to reference systems, classification of spatial
information, memorization of spatial information, etc. According to these studies 5 to
6 year old children are capable of perceiving and handling many aspects of
twodimensional spatial situations. This early development of spatial skills is also
confirmed by following research (reported in Clements, 2004; Kersh et als., 2008).
Based on these finding, our study attempts to examine the development of spatial
sense and spatial representations of 5 to 6 year old children. More specifically, we
investigated whether this development is related to the mathematical or geometrical
characteristics of the assigned spatial tasks, an approach that could help us highlight
existing differences in the abilities and performances. The findings of this research
confirmed our initial hypotheses and formed the basis for the design of a teaching
experiment that aimed at improving the development of spatial sense in early
childhood (Ikonomou & Tzekaki, 2005).
RESEARCH SETTING AND METHOD
A sample of 30 children from 4.5 to 6.5 years old were selected from different
kindergarten classes in the area of Thessaloniki. The children belonged in two different
age groups (4.5 to 5.5 and 5.5 to 6.5) having 15 pupils in each one. Individual
interviews with them were conducted in the middle of the school year.
During the interview sessions, pre-schoolers were called to reconstruct Lego
configurations. These spatial situations consisted of single, double or triple Lego bricks
laid in different positions on a base plate of 10X15 cm that were given to the children
by the researcher. The children looking at the prototype either, copied the given
configuration on their own base plate, or perceived and then mentally represented the
configuration to reconstruct it from memory. In the second case, the children’s
constructions and their success or failure in the different spatial characteristics
provided evidence about the spatial information each child could locate and retain in
memory. In this paper we will present only the part of the results that concerns these
age groups and refers to the case “reconstruct from memory”.
For this research twenty original tasks with Lego bricks arrangements were designed.
The selection of this common toy material facilitated children’s work, while at the
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same time Lego bricks and base plates could be combined in ways that presented
different spatial characteristics.
In fact, the research tasks involved five different variables (fig. 1) that describes a
spatial situation with bricks arranged on a Lego base plate: (1) number of pieces, (2)
shape of bricks, (3) direction of bricks (horizontal/vertical), (4) relative positions of
bricks (distance and alignment) and position of bricks specified by (4) origin, (5)
orientation (up/down – right/left).

Fig. 1. Variables of a configuration with 3 Lego bricks on a base plate.

The variety of these spatial characteristics enables the design of tasks with escalating
difficulty and, despite their simple structure- they allow the demonstration of many
aspects related to children’s development of spatial sense. The involvement of
preschoolers in this kind of reproductions raises interesting questions: How do children
analyze and reproduce these situations? Which spatial characteristics do the children
retain and reproduce in their constructions? How each characteristic is combined with
the others in the children’s mind? Can these data provide evidence about the
development of children’s spatial representations?
For example, there are some tasks of this study that involve only few variables
(position of a single piece, close to the edges or along the sides of the base plate). Do
they demand less analysis and thus produce simple holistic representations that most
of the children can mentally retain?
On the other hand, do the spatial arrangements that involve more characteristics like
direction and relative positions (distances) of the bricks (see fig.2, tasks LB5, LB6, LB7)
or even more complicated situations (see fig.2, tasks LB8, LB16, LB18,LB19) demand
more advanced mental representations that children gradually develop? We believe
that this kind of detailed analysis is necessary in understanding how the children
process spatial information. Moreover, it is essential for the design of appropriate
spatial activities that aim at improving spatial abilities in early childhood.
In this paper only seven tasks will be presented because they provide important
evidence concerning the significant differences between the age groups and the spatial
characteristics of the tasks. These tasks are summarized in figure 2.
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Fig. 2. Seven out of twenty research tasks.

RESULTS
Tasks and age groups
The differences in the spatial abilities between the two age groups appear clearly in
the following table (table 1) that presents the means of the successful performances at
the seven tasks. A performance was declared as successful when the child could
accurately reproduce bricks placement in his/her own base plate in respect to the five
variables previously presented.

Table 1. Means of the children’s successful performances at the 7 tasks.

As it is apparent in this table, the ratio of the younger children (group 1) who managed
to reproduce the bricks’ configuration from memory, taking into consideration
position, orientation and relative distances between pieces are low. This ratio becomes
zero when it comes to more complicated tasks. On the contrary, older children (group
2) show higher scores performing the same tasks. Lower performances in this group
appear only in the two final tasks where all spatial variables are involved. However it is
important to underline that a percentage of 20% to 33% of these students manage to
reproduce these quite complicated tasks respecting all the spatial characteristics. In
this table, we can also easily examine the differences between children’s performances
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related to the specificity of each task. An important reduction of the students’

achievement (that zeroes younger children’s results) appears in the management of
more complicated tasks, in which, not only many pieces and spatial characteristics are
involved but also all these elements must be combined (position, orientation,
directions and relative distances). This result suggests that children are probably able
to handle each of these characteristics separately but encounter increasing difficulties
when they attempt to associate them in more complex arrangements. An overview of
the differences between performances of the two groups at seven tasks is better
illustrated in the following diagram (fig. 3).

Fig.3. Differences between groups and tasks.

This overall presentation provides only general information about the spatial
characteristics that children can retain in their mind and recall for their reconstruction.
An attempt to analyze students’ performances, with respect to the different variables
of each task can contribute in a better understanding of the way they perceive these
characteristics.
Tasks and variables
In fact, the systematic analysis of what children achieved during the reconstructions of
the proposed Lego arrangements from memory provides interesting evidence about
the spatial characteristics they approach and the way they handle them, thus reveling
to us which representation they form in their minds. The quantity of data deriving
from these analyses is quite extended; therefore we will present and comment only a
part of it.
The first comments concern the spatial characteristics that children approach
successfully. Most children (80-90%) identify successfully and retain the number and
shape of the bricks in all tasks. Similarly, almost the same percentage of them places
the bricks on the right or on the left side of the base plate easily. This ease to place the
bricks correctly does not mean that preschoolers are able to recognize right from left
side in a spatial situation, but that they follow their own right/left orientation. Results
are also similar to the ones regarding the horizontal/vertical direction in the tasks with
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relevant arrangement. However, the complexity of task LB19 leads younger children to
lower achievements concerning horizontal/vertical direction.
Opposite to these variables, the children present a variety of performances dealing
with up/down orientation and identification of an origin. The following table
summarized (table 2) these performances.

Table 2. Means of successful performances concerning up/down orientation and

identification of an origin.
The children encounter certain difficulties dealing with ‘up/down’ orientation,
particularly at tasks where the decision about whether a brick is located up or down is
not the result of a simple placement but demands a more conscious identification of
what is up or down in the base plate. Some children of group 1 demonstrate apparent
difficulties to identify what is up and what is down in tasks LB5 and LB6, where bricks
are located almost in the middle of the base plate.
Low scores of younger children in the task LB16 (where the bricks are laid along the
bottom side of the plate) are related to a situation we are referring at as ‘mirror
placement’: as children were sit opposite to the researcher, they tend to consider the
position of the bricks in the original model as being in the upper part of the
researcher’s base plate so they put their bricks in the same “symmetrical” place, in the
upper part of their own base plate. The lower success in LB18 for both groups could
also be owed to the complexity of the spatial arrangement where a simple
displacement can easily change up to down.
Interesting evidence concerning the tasks present the way children identify an origin.
The data support that the decision about the origin, namely the edge of the base plate
in relation to where one or more bricks should be placed is not simple. For the task LB5
in which a single brick is placed at one of the plate’s edge, this decision becomes
simple and successful even for the younger children. The same explanation applies for
older children in the task LB16. The choice of an origin becomes less obvious for
younger children in the task LB6 and the tasks LB7 and LB8, because of the position of
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the bricks near the middle of the base plate. This location requires an organized and
purposeful choice of an edge to be the origin in relation to where other bricks will be
placed. Younger children fail to do this choice whilst older students can accomplish.
This is also confirmed by their scores in tasks LB 18 and LB 19.
Finally, as far as the relative positions are concerned results provide interesting
evidence regarding mostly the distance between pieces. These results are summarized
in the following table 3 (in the tasks with three bricks, two distance are presented).

Table 3. Means of successful performances concerning relative distances.

High performances of both age groups in task LB5 show that children are able to retain
relative distances between bricks. Older children maintain this ability in the tasks LB7,
LB8 and LB16, in which younger children also produce an interesting performance. Low
scores in the rest of tasks could be attributed to the involvement of more variables
(orientation and origins) that make these spatial situations (LB18, LB19) rather
complicated. Children do not face difficulties in locating the distances between pieces
but they are not able to combine them with other spatial information.
DISCUSSION
This study confirms in general that the preschoolers (5 – 6 years old) demonstrate a
continuous improvement of their spatial thinking related to spatial characteristics they
are able to deal with reproducing spatial situations. Despite important individual
differences, the ways in which they represent and handle this kind of spatial tasks
reveals their easiness and ability to locate and retain information concerning number
and shape of pieces, as well as their relative rectilinear placement. They also easily
follow the ‘right/left’ of this placement as far as it corresponds to their own left/right
orientation. However they present a variety of performances when they start dealing
with other spatial characteristics like origin, up/down orientation and relative positions
(alignment and distances) and even more when they attempt to combine this
information. Their spatial abilities keep developing with age and thus most of 6 years
old children improve their performance in more complicated spatial situations.
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An overall consideration suggests that children from early years dispose an important
spatial background related to two dimensional situations, which they develop
gradually. Preschoolers develop their ability to analyze spatial situations progressively,
attain one by one their spatial characteristics and later learn how to combine them.
This development is not determined and it is obviously closely related to young
children’s involvement with appropriate spatial oriented activities.
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