On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.

The existence of a sex difference in spatial thinking, notably on tasks involving mental rotation, has been a topic of considerable research and debate. We review this literature, with a particular focus on the development of this sex difference, and consider four key questions: (1) When does the sex difference emerge developmentally and does the magnitude of this difference change across development? (2) What are the biological and environmental factors that contribute to sex differences in spatial skill and how might they interact? (3) How malleable are spatial skills, and is the sex difference reduced as a result of training? and (4) Does 'spatializing' the curriculum raise the level of spatial thinking in all students and hold promise for increasing and diversifying the STEM pipeline? Throughout the review, we consider promising avenues for future research.

This article argues that executive function (EF) capacity plays a critical role in preschoolers' ability to test and revise hypotheses and, furthermore, that young children can engage in the process of testing hypotheses before they are able to revise or confirm them. Research supports the view that this ability depends on their EF capacity to represent, and reflect on, hierarchical rules relating actions to predicted or observed outcomes (i.e., differences between what they predicted and what they observed). The article concludes by discussing the ramifications of this perspective for early science education.

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