A téri orientáció és a matematikai teljesítmény összefüggései középiskolás tanulók körében

Research studies indicate that the development of spatial orientation is crucial for understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Based on this, we investigated whether there is a correlation between the mathematics grades of middle school students and their performance on various visual perception tasks. The visual perception tasks we used fell into two categories. In the first, participants had to select the development of 3D shapes from a set of given options. For each 3D shape, we offered 4-4 possible developments. In total, participants had to solve 13 tasks. In the second type of task, they also had to choose a pattern matching the presented stimulus from four possibilities. The patterns were 5x5 squares of increasing complexity, initially consisting of two, then three, and finally four colour combinations. A total of 32 students participated in the survey, comprising 12 boys and 20 girls, all of whom were high school students. The level of correlation between scores on the tasks and grade 9 marks in mathematics was investigated. The results of the statistical analysis revealed no significant difference in performance between boys and girls in each task. The performance in the two different types of functions showed a strong positive correlation (p<.05) with each other, both when the performance of girls was considered and when the performance of all students was compared. Furthermore, there was no strong correlation between the mathematics grade score and the other variables. The probable reason for this is the significantly higher proportion of numeracy tasks and a relatively low proportion of geometry tasks in the mathematics grade. A limitation of the study is the small sample size and the fact that only high school students were examined. Considering the results and limitations of our pilot study, it is promising to extend the survey to a larger sample of mixed-grade students from secondary schools and technical schools, investigating the relationship with additional subjects.