A Study of Kindergarten Children’s Spatial Representations Author:陳淑敏 hu-Min Chen
Research Article
The study was designed to investigate kindergarten children’s spatial representation through their reduced spatial representation of a large-scale space that they were familiar with, the playground. Fifty nine children were recruited from a public kindergarten to participate in the study. Each child was interviewed individually twice, using scaled models of equipments and a map of their kindergarten playground to demonstrate their spatial representation of the playground. Results indicated: (a) that kindergarten children displayed more topological relational knowledge than projective and Euclidean relational knowledge when constructing the model of their kindergarten playground; (b) that kindergarten children remembered spatial layout of the playground better than distance between each piece of equipment; (c) that kindergarten children used more typological relational cues than projective and Euclidean relational cues while searching for target locations on small-scale map; (d) that kindergarten children performed significantly better when the map and the model were aligned than unaligned; (e) that boys’ memory about the layout of their kindergarten playground was significantly better than that of girls on large-scale representations; but (f) there was no gender differences on small-scale spatial tasks.