A comparison of children's spatial reasoning: rural Appalachia, suburban, and urban New England

This study compared the developmental levels of spatial concepts in children from 3 different environments in the United States. Matched groups of 20 10-year-olds from a rural Appalachian community, a middle-class suburban community, and a lower-middle-class urban community were selected and given a Piaget-based map-drawing task. 20 separate elements, each of which is a spatial concept applied to a map feature, were assessed for developmental level (1--6). The element scores were partitioned by individual spatial concept means and analyses of variance were performed on the partitioned scores to compare the groups' developmental levels. Scheffé tests for determining all possible comparisons were then performed on the partitioned scores reaching significance between the groups. Results showed that the suburban and urban groups' mean levels of development on each of the spatial concepts did not differ significantly, and that the Appalachian children performed significantly better than one or both of the other groups on 3 out of the 4 spatial concepts. These findings support research that has demonstrated social/environmental influences on cognitive development and present evidence that urban/suburban environments in the United States are not optimal for the development of all cognitive skills.