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This paper describes the development and testing of a classroom and complementary home-based intervention to build preschoolers’ spatial orientation skills, focusing on exploring implementation feasibility and initial child learning outcomes. Spatial orientation, one type of spatial thinking, involves understanding the relationship between spatial positions, using maps and models to represent and navigate through space, and using spatial vocabulary. Evidence continues to accumulate that gaining spatial skills helps overall mathematics achievement and that learning resources are needed in this field. This mixed-methods study is the third in a series of investigations that leverage a design-based implementation research approach to develop preschool resources to support spatial orientation with both hands-on and technology-based experiences. Through a quasi-experimental comparison study, treatment teachers implemented eight weeks of hands-on activities, read-aloud stories, and digital activities (including an augmented reality app) and a sample of families also engaged in complementary home-based activities. The findings suggest that the resources help teachers feasibly implement spatial lessons, and preschoolers improve their learning of spatial concepts with the use of the classroom and home-based intervention. 

This article describes the use of a digital tool to conduct investigations that allow young children to collect data to answer questions that are interesting and developmentally appropriate for preschoolers. The curricular program is designed as a set of hands-on experiences for preschoolers to engage in problem-solving with data. The digital tool supports the teacher to mediate each step in the investigation process, as preschoolers collaborate to pose a question of interest, identify categories or variables that can help answer the question, proceed through the data collection process, and quickly generate a visualization (graph or tally chart) that drives a deeper discussion or “data talk” to make sense of the data. By maximizing the affordances of technology, data can be efficiently collected while children engage in science practices (e.g. asking questions) and mathematics learning (e.g. gather relevant data, sort and classify by attributes, analysis and interpretation of data). The use of this digital resource amplifies the scaffolding of each investigation, assists in the details of planning and conducting investigations, and provides colorful, engaging visuals to spur discussions about the data in relevant, age-appropriate ways. Throughout the process, children can build on and expand their mathematics and scientific knowledge and skills.