.7-11 Grade Students' Spatial Ability Development Research

This research mainly investigated the feature of the development in six aspects ( folding & unfolding; rotation; composing; direction; horizontality; reasoning ) of spatial ability of 454 students in grade 7-11. Besides, it told the relation between the development of the spatial ability and the marks of geometry. The research showed:1. In a word, the spatial ability of the students improved with the ages or grades. But students in different grades had different pace in the ability. Different items in the research had different developments.2. Under the condition of the research, there existed gender differences .Boyes had better abilities than girls, but from the study we knowed the significant differences were just in the students of grade 7, 9, 10. And the differences were changing with the grade improving. However, we couldn't find the significant differences between girls and boys in the composing and horizontality. Girls would do better and better ,they would have better ability as they got older. Then the differences between sexes disappeared in the grade 11. After more studying, we could see these differences were generally in the students who were weak in geometry study.3. The spatial ability was of greatly positive relevance to the marks of geometry, generally speaking, if the students did well in the geometry,they would also have good spatial ability. If the students didn't do so well in the geometry,they would also have not so good spatial ability. However, some high mark students would do worse than low mark students. This suggested that whether the students had the good spatial ability wasn't the only reason of getting high marks of geometry. Because it also deponded other reasons such as the way of study, teaching, the ability of languages, the aims of study.4. The ages also had relation with the spatial ability between these relations(marks of geometry and ages),the marks of geometry was the most important reason of the spatial ability.