Psychology Commons^™

Understanding The Home Spatial Environment, Nelcida L. Garcia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Spatial thinking encompasses several related skills including understanding size, shape, translation and rotation of objects, and distance between objects. Individual differences in spatial thinking are important predictors of children’s math and science achievement, as well as later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This dissertation proposes Relational Developmental Systems Theory as a lens to study spatial development. Informed by Relational Developmental Systems Theory, two empirical studies examined whether mothers’ characteristics affected their parenting practices, and in turn, their children’s spatial abilities (i.e., mental rotation, spatial scaling). First, in a sample of 165 mother-child dyads, mothers’ spatial ability …