Children's expressions of spatial knowledge

Different expressions of spatial knowledge were examined by having groups of first-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children perform model construction, verbal description, and route reversal tasks after they learned the correct path through a pedestrian maze. Age-related improvement was found in the rate of learning the maze and in the accuracy of verbal descriptions, suggesting that maze learning may be verbally mediated. All children performed well in sequencing intersections in the model but performed poorly in choosing path options in the model. Route reversal after learning was accurate and equivalent across groups. Overall, results suggest that both general and task-specific skills are involved in different products of spatial knowledge.