Game Training Of Mental Rotation Ability In Children Aged 5 To 6 Years

Mental rotation,as a spatial ability closely related to individual mathematical development,plays an important role in the immature curriculum transition of mathematics.However,the existing training methods of mental rotation ability are still limited in their application in preschool education,and only the course teaching training method could be directly applied.In view of the fact that games are one of the basic activities of preschool children in kindergarten,this study adopts the principle of manual training,combined with the form of children’s group games,designed a set of group games with the goal of improving children’s mental rotation ability.In the meantime of testing the effectiveness of this training method,the effectiveness of computer-based group test in this age group is further discussed,as well as the expanding effect in the measuring tools by classifying the difficulty of stimulus and adopting the response time index in addition to the accuracy index which is traditionally used.In this study,children aged 5 to 6 years from the senior class of kindergarten were selected as the study subjects.The validity of the mental rotation test and the difficulty classification of the selected stimulus were tested by pre-experiment.Then,the experimental group(46 students)and the control group(46 students)were conducted three group tests(pre-test,immediate post-test and tracking post-test)by quasi-experimental design.Between pre-test and immediate post-test,a total of 9times of game trainings were conducted in the experimental group.Key findings of the study were as follows:(1)The results of pre-experiment showed that the mental rotation test developed in this study had good validity,and the difficulty classification of the two groups of stimulus selected in the test was confirmed.Specifically,the stimulus in the profile group was significantly easier than those in the portrait group on the mental rotation test.(2)Group test can be an effective and convenient way to collect data from the children aged 5 to 6 years.However,repeated tests or individual one-to-one tests are needed to achieve the best performance that children can currently achieve.(3)The mental rotation game designed in this study can effectively improve the mental rotation speed of 5 to 6 years old children whose pretest performance is beyond the random level,but has no obvious training effect on children whose pretest performance is at the random level.(4)The adoption of reaction time and difficulty classification of stimulus can effectively expand the measuring span when measuring training effects.