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Hi, welcome back to the VEX Studio. My name is Jason McKenna and welcome back to our series on the book, Hands On, Minds On: How Executive Function, Motor, and Spatial Skills Foster School Readiness. In this interview series, we are talking to the author of the book, Dr. Claire Cameron, who's an associate professor at the University of Buffalo. With her work in this book, and specifically in part four, we are talking about spatial skills.

Spatial skills are probably something that we're familiar with as STEM teachers. You think about students building a robot, you think about spatial skills, but in this series, in this segment, we're gonna talk about how spatial skills don't just help with STEM skills but they form the foundational skills that help our students in all subjects. So enjoy part four. Again, if you're really enjoying this interview, I would really encourage you to purchase the book. You can see how to purchase the book right here. And also, use the code CAMERON to receive 15% off and free shipping. So enjoy part four. And I'll see you here again for part five.

Now, I've done a lot of reading on spatial skills because obviously it's the direct tie into building a robot, for example, but as you point out in your book, it's difficult to assign a specific definition to spatial skills. You refer to it, and I love this, as an umbrella term. So instead of asking you to define spatial skills, can you just describe spatial skills for us?

Sure. And when I attempted to define spatial skills, I found it very challenging, but I also found David Uttal's work and his research group. And what they did was they looked at over 200 studies of spatial learning and they used those studies to develop a definition of spatial skills that involve skills around two different dimensions, an object properties, an object and its properties, and an object moving in space. And it could also be, well, the object is static, but I'm moving and my perspective of it changes. And so those two dimensions can be combined and give rise to multiple different spatial skills.

So I did a chart where I looked at those different spatial skills but I decided for educators of young children that it would be maybe most useful to talk about the processes that underlie the different spatial skills, some of the things that are common to spatial learning. And in your book, you do go through and mention some of those cognitive processes. I'll list a few of them here: perceptual skills, spatial working memory, transformational skills, and constructional skills. Can you say a few things about some of those please?

Sure. So perceptual skills are where we use our senses to notice and discern spatial information. So typically we're using our vision, but someone whose vision is impaired might use echoes as they come into a new room and they are listening for where objects are in the room, for example. So perceptual skills are fundamental to our survival, they develop very early, well before elementary school. And we use perceptual skills to notice things like size, distance, location, or volume. And then once we have awareness of that information, then we can do other things with it, which I'll...

Shall I keep going?

Yeah. Keep going, please.

Okay, so spatial working memory, we've talked about working memory but there's actually two types, there's phonological or verbal working memory, for spatial skills, we use our visual spatial working memory. So this is where we are having spatial information in our mind and we're doing some type of work with it. So I'll give an example, for adults, I want everybody to picture right now if you could picture what's in your refrigerator and think about what you wanna make for dinner and then picture what your fridge might look like after you've used the ingredients and made that dinner.

So you're having to envision something and then perform some changes on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Transformational skills allow us to imagine a change to an object, such as rotating it 90 degrees or looking at an object from a different perspective. Let's stay with the dinner example. Now you've got the dinner ingredients on your counter, you're standing up looking down at them. What if you were to crouch on the floor and look up at the counter? You're going to see something different. So that's a type of transformation.

Then finally, we have constructional skills, which use the other three processes, and that's where we create or construct something in two or three dimensions. Yeah. A very concrete constructional task is when your child gets a new toy that has to be put together following the instructions in the box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people love doing those activities, and some of us find them very challenging. Yes, yes. And some people just want to build on their own; they don't want to follow directions. No, that's exactly right.

To pick up on that, with the constructional skills, I was really fascinated about how important the idea of copying is, as you talk about in the book. Tracing or drawing an object or tracing or drawing letters is important for our students to be able to do. Can you elaborate on that a little bit, please?

Sure, and I like to come out and say, copying, I think, in our society has a fairly negative connotation. Negative connotation. Absolutely. As a college professor, I never want to see copied writing. So in my book, I try to give a different perspective on copying and talk about constructional skills. There's neuroscience work that indicates that when we are copying, we're actually using more cognitive processes than when we're, say, drawing freehand. We need part-whole perceptual skills. If I asked you to draw a picture of this part of the book cover, you have to first notice what's there and see there are five house-looking shapes. But then, how are you going to actually copy those? That gets into the details.

If you had a sheet of paper, you'd have to do what I mentioned earlier, motor planning. Yeah. You have to decide where on the paper you're going to start the work. You're always making comparisons between the model and your version of it. Maybe you've run out of space on the page, and you need to be flexible and make some type of change. We're also using our visual-spatial working memory when we copy because you're not constantly staring at the model; you're looking down at a blank workspace. You have to keep that model in your mind as you copy.

You know, what really jumped out at me when you mentioned paper, I remember like it was yesterday teaching students, whether it was in my writing class or in a math class. They would be writing a math problem out or finishing their sentence, and they had no idea that they just ran out of paper. They ran on the side of the paper and they would just go write onto the desk. They would go write onto the desk or have these awkward transitions because they would be halfway through a word and continue it on the next line, as opposed to just writing the whole word on the next line. Or they get halfway on a number. If they're writing out 1,672, they write the one and the six and continue it onto the next line. I was just being dumbfounded at that, not understanding that that's an example of these spatial skills that you're talking about. This was something that the students were lacking in, and they needed some help in being able to do.

So that example, I'm sure teachers that are watching this are going to hit home with them also, but that example really, really hit home for me. And that's another example of cognitive load. Yes.

So the student was so focused on completing the problem they weren't even attending to the spatial problem, the paper problem. Because it wasn't automated for them. Like you were talking about before, they had to think about it and they weren't thinking about it, and that's really, really fascinating.

Now in your chapter on spatial skills, you reference a lot of the work by David Uttal, you mentioned him a moment ago. His work is important because it identifies that spatial skills can be improved in both children and adults. Prior to that, in reading about his work, many believed that spatial skills were fixed, either you had it, or you didn't have it. This is an important takeaway for teachers. We just talked about the examples that I mentioned, our children can improve their spatial skills and as teachers, we can help them do that. Can you discuss that please?

Sure, so most cognitive skills, most skills in life can be improved with practice and the right kind of support, which includes feedback. And that absolutely includes spatial skills and spatial reasoning. So I wanna go back to early in our conversation, the idea of learning opportunities and constraints, so an educator might meet a child that they think has a gift or talent for spatial skills. Well, that child was probably the preschooler who is in the block area all the time, right? Yeah, yeah. And so they develop what appears to be a talent, but there's lots of practice and repetition going on there.

So I see a teacher's job and when I work with my students, I see the same responsibility is to provide opportunities, in our case for spatial skill learning, to all children, maybe particularly focusing not only on the ones with what appears to be a gift, but the ones who may not have had opportunities to develop their spatial skills. It's really fascinating because we hear this a lot with literacy, obviously. You know, reading to children when they were young. I did it with my daughter when she was very young, my wife and I did it with her, but doing that so they come to school prepared to read or they come to school as readers. It seems like as society, that is something that we're really bought in on. It would be nice if we could extend that also to spatial skills.

I agree, yeah, to your point there a moment ago. One quick story, when I started reading more about spatial skills, I read your book, I read Uttal's work, I was discussing this with Bob Mimlitch, who's the co-founder of our company. So Bob is a mechanical engineer, Tony Norman was an electrical engineer, they started our company by mentoring a high school robotics team in Tony's garage. You know, the famous startup story. But what he said to me, he was like they had such a difficult time communicating to the students because with Tony and Bob, their spatial skills were so advanced and trying to talk about how to manipulate parts of the robot, how to rotate things and do that, that communication was so difficult for them to figure out ways to essentially get around that, they had to use a lot more physical objects as opposed to being able to talk about things because their spatial skills were so advanced. So I think about that a lot to your point there of essentially eliminating those gaps for our young students, making sure they all have that opportunity to foster those spatial skills. That's really important.

Well, I'd love to respond. I love stories and that one illustrates the nonverbal component, right? So spatial skills are not verbal, and yet so much of what we do in classrooms is communicate with children verbally. So this is really an invitation to think about the nonverbal, both when we think about motor development and spatial skills, we're thinking about concepts and activities and processes that one can put words to, but they're not inherently verbal.

Yeah.

And they're still really valuable. Hands On, Minds On. Exactly. Yep.

If you have any questions or comments about anything that was discussed in this segment, please go to the Professional Learning Community at VEX Professional Development Plus. Myself, other members of the team, and other educators would love to engage you in a dialogue about these important concepts.

The things that we discussed in this book are so important. If you want to explore further, or if you just want to explore the book, please put those comments in our Professional Learning Community. We'd be happy to engage with you in that dialogue about the book and about this segment.

So thank you very much.

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