Collaborative Research: Fostering Elementary School Students' Visuospatial Skills and Mathematical Competencies through an Origami-based Program

美国STEM专业人才严重短缺，对于人数不足的学习者来说，这一差距更加明显。2017年，全国四年级英语学习者(ELL)学生教育进步评估的平均数学分数比非ELL同龄人的平均分数低26分。要缩小这一差距，就需要采取干预措施，重点放在数学和支持数学学习的视觉空间能力上。视觉空间能力和数学能力在大多数STEM领域都很重要，而在美国，这两种能力在代表性不足的学习者中都没有得到充分发展。尽管在开发循证数学课程和以视觉方式呈现数学概念或问题方面做出了越来越多的努力，但大多数视觉空间干预措施都是在实验室环境中实施的(例如，视频游戏；心理旋转培训)，而且其方式很难转化为现有的教育环境。该项目将以了解研究情况的方法为基础，改进和评价创新的折纸课程和教学指南，以满足提高学生视觉空间能力和空间语言及相关数学能力的需要。这个项目将建立在国家科学基金会资助的一个项目(DRL-1713547)的基础上，在该项目中，小学生将有目的的折纸评为他们经历过的最吸引人的动手STEM活动之一。该项目将改进和评估以折纸为基础的视觉空间技能创新计划的有效性、耐用性和转移性，重点是小学成绩不佳的英语学习者(ELL)。这项研究将提供一项独特而全面的实验评估，评估基于折纸的项目对不同类型视觉空间能力发展的贡献，以及后者如何对儿童的数学发展做出贡献。该项目是认知心理学家、学习科学家、数学教育研究人员和原创者之间的合作努力，专注于创造适合发展和参与的教育干预措施，并更好地理解儿童的视觉空间推理和他们的数学学习之间的关系。研究成果将通过学术研究会议和同行评议的研究期刊上的出版物传播和分享。此外，在该项目中开发的职业发展协议将提供一种直接的方式来扩大这种干预，并帮助教育工作者将这种新方法融入他们的实践中。该项目由EHR核心研究计划资助，该计划为STEM学习和学习环境、STEM劳动力发展和扩大STEM参与方面的基础研究提供资金。重要的是，该项目扩展了之前的纵向相关研究，通过实验设计和对240名四年级学生进行了为期12个月的跟踪研究，调查了视觉空间技能的获得和学生数学能力之间的因果联系。该项目通过迭代的基于设计的研究过程改进了一种引人入胜的干预措施，以帮助确定能够以最佳方式培养儿童视觉空间技能的学习和教学组成部分。这一项目将借鉴以往考察空间训练效果的研究成果，包括一套全面有效的视觉空间技能、数学能力、调解人和混淆因素的衡量标准，这将使我们能够第一次检查学生的视觉空间活动与其新出现的空间和数学能力之间的复杂关系。同时，该项目将确定重要的认知因素和教学策略，这些因素和教学策略有助于英语学习成绩低下的学生发展视觉空间和数学技能。对这一高危学生群体的关注将提高我们对如何构建更具包容性的学习环境的理解，并将为有重点的干预提供明确的方向，以实现为更多成绩不佳的ELL学生进入STEM领域做准备的更广泛目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.