Gender Differences in Mental Rotation and Visualisation Across Adolescence: Large Scale Evidence from the United States, Ireland, and Austria with Single-Paper Meta-Analyses

Spatial ability has been identified as an essential cognitive ability for educational performance broadly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Further, children with higher levels of this ability are more likely to choose STEM educational pathways. It is theorised that a benefit of spatial ability lies in affording young people further capacity to think and reason effectively in diverse problem-solving contexts, which translates into desirable educational outcomes. However, substantial evidence has identified a gender gap favouring boys particularly in the mental rotation spatial factor, and there is less evidence for any similar gender gaps for other spatial factors, particularly in adolescence. Resolving this knowledge gap would offer a knowledge base on which to design educational interventions, particularly in terms of what spatial factors to target and when. In response to this, this paper reports on three large scale studies from the US, Ireland, and Austria in which mental rotation and visualisation performance data were collected across adolescence. Single-paper meta-analyses, for both mental-rotation and visualisation tasks, reveal medium and small gender differences respectively favouring boys, with these gender differences already apparent from the beginning of adolescence. Age was a significant moderator for both, indicating that the gender difference continues to grow during adolescence, and instrument type moderated mental rotation effect size magnitude but the effect size for visualisation was robust across instruments. The results support the introduction of interventions to reduce or prevent these gender gaps in childhood, otherwise early in adolescence, and further research into the potential sources of gender differences in spatial ability and of educational consequences of the visualisation factor specifically beyond mental rotation.