0000000000621180
AUTHOR
Stefania Lucia Buccheri
Mental Images and School Learning: A Longitudinal Study on Children
Recent literature have underlined the connections between children’s reading skills and capacity to create and use mental representations or mental images; furthermore data highlighted the involvement of visuospatial abilities both during math learning and during subsequent developmental phases in performing math tasks. The present research adopted a longitudinal design to assess whether the processes of mental imagery in preschoolers (ages 4–5 years) are predictive of mathematics skills, writing and reading, in the early years of primary school (ages 6–7 years). The research lasted for two school years; in the first phase, the general group of participants consisted of 100 children, and al…
Development of the Mental Imagery Scale for Preschool Children using Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory
This study aimed to develop a measure of mental imagery evaluation in preschool children. Three studies were conducted: Study 1 focused on the exploration of the factorial structure, reliability, and Item Response Theory (IRT) discrimination on a sample of children from 4 to 5 years old (N = 100; 50% males and 50% females); Study 2 focused on the confirmation of results about dimensionality on a sample of children from 4 to 7 years old (N = 170; 50% males and 50% females); and Study 3 focused on verifying criterion validity on a sample of children from 4 to 5 years old (N = 70; 47.1% males and 52.9% females). The results confirmed the hypothesis of three reliable factors underlying the scal…