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

美国的STEM专业人才严重短缺，对于代表性不足的学习者来说，这一差距更为明显。2017年，在全国教育进步评估中，四年级英语学习者（ELL）学生的平均数学分数比非ELL学生的平均分数低26分。要缩小这一差距，就需要着重于数学和支持数学学习的视觉空间能力的干预措施。视觉空间和数学能力在大多数STEM领域都很重要，但在美国，这两种能力在代表性不足的学习者中都不发达。尽管越来越多的人致力于开发基于证据的数学课程，并以视觉方式呈现数学概念或问题，但大多数视觉空间干预都是在实验室环境中实施的（例如，视频游戏；心理旋转训练），而且很难转化为现有的教育环境。本项目将以研究为基础，完善和评估一套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、空间语言和相关数学能力的需求。该项目将以美国国家科学基金会资助的项目（DRL-1713547）为基础，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干活动之一。该项目将改进和评估一项创新的基于折纸的视觉空间技能课程的有效性、持久性和可移植性，重点关注小学英语学习成绩较差的学生。本研究将提供一个独特而全面的实验评估，以折纸为基础的项目对不同类型的视觉空间能力的发展的贡献，以及后者如何促进儿童的数学发展。该项目是认知心理学家、学习科学家、数学教育研究人员和折纸家之间的合作成果，重点是创造适合发展的、引人入胜的教育干预措施，并更好地理解儿童的视觉空间推理和数学学习之间的关系。研究成果将通过学术研究会议和在同行评议的研究期刊上发表的出版物进行传播和分享。此外，项目中制定的专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，该计划资助STEM学习和学习环境，STEM劳动力发展以及扩大STEM参与的基础研究。重要的是，该项目扩展了以前的纵向相关研究，通过实验设计和对240名四年级学生进行为期12个月的随访研究，调查视觉空间技能的提高与学生数学能力之间的因果关系。该项目通过迭代设计为基础的研究过程，完善了一种引人入胜的干预方法，以帮助确定能够最佳地培养儿童视觉空间技能的学习和教学组件。该项目将借鉴先前研究空间训练效果的成果，并包括一套全面的视觉空间技能、数学能力、中介和混淆因素的有效测量方法，这将使我们能够第一次研究学生的视觉空间活动与他们新兴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，有助于发展视觉空间和数学技能在低成绩的ELL学生。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，并将为重点干预提供明确的方向，以实现让更多成绩较差的ELL学生进入STEM领域的更广泛目标。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.