The discovery was recently made in a new scientific study

Feb 17, 2012 09:29 GMT  ·  By
Solving puzzles improves children's spatial abilities, making them more apt to follow an education in STEM
   Solving puzzles improves children's spatial abilities, making them more apt to follow an education in STEM

University of Chicago investigators recently conducted a new investigation on children, which demonstrated that solving puzzles has the ability to improve both spatial skills and performances in mathematics. The connection between these phenomena intrigued researchers.

They say that puzzles apparently play a huge role in teaching us how to figure out problems through reasoning, rather than by other means. The results are all the more interesting since the work was conducted on kids aged 2 to 4.

When the study group was again assessed at 4 and a half years, researchers determined that those who were in the habit of playing with puzzles tended to display significantly better spatial skills than their peers who played with other toys.

In order to ensure that the results were correct, UC scientists also accounted for other factors that may have influenced the results of the study, such as for example the amount of money the parents made, their level of eduction, and the type of language they used around their children.

The group, led by psychologist Susan Levine, explains that spatial skills were the target of this investigation because they play a huge role in people's performances in fields such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Kids may be more likely to move into STEM later in life, if they play with puzzles early on. This is extremely important in the United States, where fewer and fewer young adults opt for technical fields.

“As early as the preschool years and persisting into adulthood, there are individual and gender differences on certain spatial tasks, notably those involving mental rotation [of objects],” the group says, in a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Developmental Science.

“These variations are of considerable interest because of their reported relation to mathematics achievement,” they go on to say. “This study brings greater awareness of the learning opportunities for children in everyday activities,” adds Soo-Siang Lim.

The investigator is a program director with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Science of Learning Centers Program. “It is important because this and follow-up studies could potentially lead to relatively easy and inexpensive interventions to improve spatial skills important for STEM education,” Lim adds.

In the experiments UC investigators conducted, the children were surveyed for their ability to rotate and translate shapes, something that is critical for technical thinking. The research was carried out over 2 years, on a sample of 53 children-parents pairs.