Do you have trouble imagining how objects fit together? Do mental rotation puzzles make you anxious? What does this have to do with math?
This project uses the Grounded and Embodied Learning Framework to investigate how spatial systems such as spatial ability and anxiety impact students’ mathematical thinking and how we can develop interventions for these systems to improve mathematical teaching, thinking, and learning. Initial work focuses on adding to the spatial ability literature by exploring how specific subfactors of spatial ability and spatial anxiety were associated with different domains of mathematics in adults (Schenck & Nathan, 2020) and the relationship between spatial ability and spatial anxiety (Schenck & Nathan, 2022). This work later expanded to fraction knowledge in children through a collaboration with Dr. Edward Hubbard (Schenck et al., 2022). The current study is investigating whether embodied spatial tasks can impact students’ geometric thinking and gesture production.
