The Influence of Visuospatial Intervention on Mathematical Ability

The research proposal of this study intends to identify whether visuospatial interventions improve mathematical ability in college students. Visuospatial skills are important for identifying the distance between two objects, memory of images, and visualizing objects by mentally rotating them. The two important concepts relating to visuospatial ability are spatial relations and spatial visualizations. These are the abilities to mentally rotate two dimensional and three dimensional objects. Prior research has shown that visuospatial interventions are an effective tool for the improvement mathematical performance. This study is designed to see whether mathematical aptitude improves from pre-test to post-test after participation in visuospatial interventions. A visuospatial assessment, a mathematical assessment, and a demographic survey were utilized to provide data on factors such as age, prior visuospatial experience, gender, and intelligence; factors which we believe could be extraneous variables. After pilot testing, participants scored 60% and 50% on the visuospatial and mathematical diagnoses test, respectively. These preliminary results suggest that further pilot testing and assessment revision is needed in order to accurately measure baseline visuospatial and mathematical ability