The aim of this study is to examine whether the structural model that Sahin and Ates (2020) put forward about the relationship among students' scientific literacy levels, logical thinking ability, cognitive styles, mental capacity, and mental rotation ability differ in terms of gender. A causal-comparative model approach was used in this study.…

In this paper, MTL, an approach for visualization-based pedagogy, is analyzed and contextualized in both Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and Dual Coding Theory (DCT). Through MTL, lectures, tutorials, laboratory sessions and individual study in learning and teaching programming are all carried out using two cognitive channels; verbal and non-verbal.…

Some cognitive abilities exhibit reliable gender differences, with females outperforming males in specific aspects of verbal ability, and males showing an advantage on certain spatial tasks. Among these cognitive gender differences, differences in mental rotation are the most robust, and appear to be present even in infants. A large body of animal…

The ability to mentally rotate objects in space has been singled out by cognitive scientists as a central metric of spatial reasoning (see Jansen, Schmelter, Quaiser-Pohl, Neuburger, & Heil, 2013; Shepard & Metzler, 1971 for example). However, this is a particularly undeveloped area of current mathematics curricula, especially in North…

There were two purposes in the study. One was to explore the cognitive activities during spatial problem solving and the other to probe the relationship between spatial ability and science concept learning. Twenty university students participated in the study. The Purdue Visualization of Rotations Test (PVRT) was used to assess the spatial…

A student might find a certain representational format (e.g., diagram, text) more attractive than other formats for learning. Computer technology offers opportunities to adjust the formats used in learning environments to the preferences of individual learners. The question addressed in the current study was: does the match between a student's…

Recent psychometric results [Mem. Cogn. 29 (2001) 745] have supported a distinction between mental abilities that require a spatial transformation of a perceived object (e.g., mental rotation) and those that involve imagining how a scene looks like from different viewpoints (e.g., perspective taking). Two experiments provide further evidence for…

This article reviews recent empirical investigations of imagination or mental practice in highly cognitive, realistic educational domains such as mathematics or learning computer applications. While mental practice has been a standard tool in training schedules devised by sports psychologists for several decades, with its efficacy studied…

This study of the haptic processing of 9 children with specific language impairment and 9 normal-language children (ages 5-7) found that both groups performed similarly when the response modality was tactile and task requirements were minimal and performed differently when response demands included cross-modal processing or increased symbolic and…

Forty-two undergraduates were tested to determine how scores on visual and verbal divergent thinking tests would be affected by instructions to use visual imagery and by individual differences in visual imagery ability. Results indicated that such instructions may interfere with test performance, but that individual differences did not influence…

Three hypotheses accounting for individual differences in spatial visualization ability were investigated in 2 experiments with 142 male undergraduates at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). Support was found for the preservation-under-transformation hypothesis, suggesting that effectiveness of storage during concurrent information…

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between the extent of visualization of poetically elicited mental images (V) and five other variables involved in response to poetry: extent of verbal interpretation of the meaning of poetry; extent of recall of poetry; accuracy of recall of poetry; extent of liking of poetry; and level of…

A study examined whether exemplar-specific or prototype representations were primarily used by 28 children (ages 10-12) with mild mental retardation in a categorization task consisting of two groups of make-believe animals whose features were ill-defined. Results indicated the children were able to acquire and use both types of representations.…

A study designed to test the Piagetian theory that distinct stages in the organization of memory relating to horizontality correspond to successive stages in operative level was conducted with 154 twelve- to fourteen-year-old subjects. Loglinear and path analysis models were used to describe the association between operative level and spatial…

The premise of the Creative Technology Project, a collaboration by Autodesk, Inc., the School of Education at Oregon State University, and Novato Unified School District in the San Francisco Bay Area, was that children's cognitive abilities could be enhanced by having them develop, displace, transform, and interact with 2D and 3D…