Sports and mathematical abilities in primary school-aged children: How important are spatial abilities? An explorative s
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Sports and mathematical abilities in primary school-aged children: How important are spatial abilities? An explorative study Petra Jansen 1
&
Stefanie Pietsch 2
Accepted: 11 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract It is well known that sports and mathematical abilities are related to spatial abilities, also a relation between sport and mathematical abilities is assumed. However, the relation between all three aspects has not been investigated until now. Therefore, the main goal of the study is to examine the relationship between sport, spatial and mathematical ability in elementary school aged children. 50 boys and 42 girls from third grade solved spatial and sport tasks, which can be differentiated into the following: intrinsic-dynamic, intrinsic-static and extrinsic-static. Furthermore, their performances in mathematical (separated into numerical/arithmetical and geometrical) abilities were analyzed. The results showed significant correlations between the static spatial and sporting activities. This correlation is due to the strong correlation within the group of girls. Furthermore, a good performance in the intrinsic-spatial ability was related to a high geometrical ability of the children, especially in boys. However, the geometrical ability could not be predicted by sport abilities. Keywords Primary school-aged children . Intrinsic and extrinsic spatial abilities . Sport performance . Numerical knowledge . Geometrical abilities
Introduction There is often anecdotal evidence that children who are good at mathematics are also good at sports, however there are only a few studies investigating this relationship (Beck et al., 2016). Furthermore, it is well known that mathematical as well as sports abilities are related to spatial abilities at least in adults (e.g. Voyer & Jansen, 2017). Therefore, the main goal of this study is to investigate the relation between sports, mathematical and spatial abilities in primary school-aged children. Until now the relations between all three aspects have not been investigated. Before presenting the possible relationships, the main aspects of spatial, mathematical and sports abilities will be discussed.
* Petra Jansen [email protected] 1
Faculty of Human Science, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, 93053 Regensburg, Germany
2
University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
Main Aspects of Spatial, Mathematical and Sports Abilities Spatial abilities can roughly be differentiated between three factors: spatial orientation (perception of the position of various objects in space), mental rotation (imagining the rotation of objects) and spatial visualization (perception of complex spatial patterns) (Mix & Cheng, 2012). A new theoretically motivated typology of spatial abilities was presented by Uttal et al. (2013) who analyzed the spatial training literature: They differentiate between an intrinsic versus extrinsic and a dynamic versus static dimension. Intrinsic is related to the specification of the parts of an object and the relation between different parts
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