Preschoolers' Understanding of Plan and Oblique Maps: The Role of Geometric and Representational Correspondence

Abstract

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Education for Spatial Thinking

“…What's a map?" (Liben & Yekel, 1996, p. 2786, over half were able to explain maps as archives of location information (e.g., "Where things are" and "Things with different countries"), as navigation tools (e.g., "Something to get around places" and "Something if you get lost, it helps you to get somewhere . .…”

“…The latter tasks, however, typically place only very minimal demands on children's understanding of symbols because there is usually a unique symbol for each unique referent. When representation tasks include symbols that are less iconic or include multiple instances of the same symbol, performance is significantly worse (see Blades & Spencer, 1994;Liben & Yekel, 1996). In such cases, children may need to rely on spatial understanding to disambiguate which of two or more identical symbols stands for a particular referent.…”

“…One line of evidence comes from the spontaneous errors children make in interpreting symbols on plan (overhead) maps. For example, an overhead view of a double sink on a plan map of the preschool classroom was interpreted as a "door " (Liben & Yekel, 1996), an interpretation that makes sense if one assumes that the child thought of the graphic as a straight-ahead view of door panels. Similar findings have been obtained in research using aerial photographs, as, for example, when primary school children identified tennis courts as doors (Spencer, Harrison, & Darvizeh, 1980) and railroad cards lined up in parallel as " bookshelves" (see Liben & Downs, 2001).…”

“…Another line of evidence that children have difficulty interpreting representations that depict referents from unfamiliar vantage points comes from their differential performance on maps using different viewing angles. Preschool children were more accurate in placing stickers to show objects' locations on an oblique map of their class that more closely mirrors their own viewing experience than on a plan map that depicts the room in a way that is never experienced directly (Liben & Yekel, 1996).…”

The relation between spatial thinking and proportional reasoning in preschoolers

“…Studies investigating children's map use in spatial search tasks have shown that preschoolers have great difficulties (Liben & Yekel, 1996), and their accuracy to locate targets develops considerably (Frick & Newcombe, 2012;Vasilyeva & Huttenlocher, 2004). However, if task requirements are low, even 3-year-olds succeed in using metric information from small-scale maps (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Vasilyeva, 1999).…”