ABSTRACT
The development of children’s ideas about qualities of space is of longstanding interest to researchers and educators alike. For the former, reasoning about space provides a window to issues of mind, such as how children represent images or process configural information (Anderson, 1983; Eilan, McCarthy, & Brewer, 1993; Kosslyn, 1980). For the latter, because effective instructional design ideally begins with children’s prior knowledge (Bruer, 1994; Freudenthal, 1973), children’s reasoning provides the foundation for instruction about the mathematics of space.
