4. Discussion
In this study, we investigated the relationships between VSWM,
intuitive geometry and academic achievement in geometry in
secondary school students.
In particular,we expected to find a relationship between VSWMand
intuitive geometry, and we hypothesized that both intuitive geometry
and VSWMcould predict academic achievement in geometry. To investigate
these issues, the total score obtained in the intuitive geometry
task devised by Dehaene et al. (2006) was used as a mediator variable.
The final path model showed that only two of the six VSWM tasks
considered were significantly related to the intuitive geometry
task, namely a complex span task (jigsaw puzzle) and a simple storage
task assessing spatial-sequentialmemory (sequential dotmatrix). Only
the jigsaw puzzle task related directly to academic achievement in geometry
(i.e., the score in the MT advanced geometry task), whereas
the sequential dot matrix task indirectly predicted academic achievement
in geometry.