Discuss school-age children's spatial-reasoning skills as it relates to their understanding of cognitive maps

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: Children's cognitive maps are their mental representations of spaces, such as a classroom, school, or neighborhood. Drawing or reading a map of a large-scale space (school or neighborhood) requires considerable perspective-taking skill. Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer its overall layout by relating its separate parts. Preschoolers and young school-age children include landmarks on maps they draw of a single room, but their arrangement is not always accurate. They do better when asked to place stickers showing the location of furniture and people on a map of the room. But if the map is rotated to a position other than the room's orientation, they have difficulty. In identifying landmarks on a rotated map, 7-year-olds are aided by the opportunity to walk through the room. Actively exploring it permits them to experience landmarks from different vantage points, which fosters a more flexible mental representation. With respect to large-scale outdoor environments, not until age 9 can many children accurately place stickers on a map to indicate the location of landmarks. Children who spontaneously use strategies that help them align the map with their current location in the space—rotating the map or tracing their route on it—show better performance. Around this age, the maps children draw of large-scale spaces become better organized, showing landmarks along an organized route of travel. At the same time, children are able to give clear, well-organized instructions for getting from one place to another by using a "mental walk" strategy—imagining another person's movements along a route. At the end of middle childhood, most children can form an accurate overall view of a large-scale space. And they readily draw and read maps, even when the orientation of the map and the space it represents do not match. Ten- to 12-year-olds also grasp the notion of scale—the proportional relation between a space and its map representation. And they appreciate that in interpreting map symbols, a mapmaker's assigned meaning supersedes physical resemblance—for example, that green dots (not red dots) may indicate where red fire trucks are located.