Psychometric properties of Visuospatial Development Questionnaire in preschool children in Mashhad

The visuospatial development is one of the most important foundations of development, since it plays the role of the primary function of all learning and communication, and forms the mental representations of the outside world. On the other hand, this development simultaneously contains spatial information and directs all movements in space. Measurement of this development and its various dimensions is vital in the early years of life, since with this information we can estimate the visuospatial capacity of the child and examine the change of this basic capacity during life span. The aim of the present study was to provide psychometric properties for the visuospatial development questionnaire (Harry Wachs, 2014) for use in Iran. A questionnaire was filled out on 348 preschool children in Mashhad that were selected randomly by multistage stratified sampling method and psychometric indices were calculated using statistical software. The findings showed that the questionnaire had a satisfactory content and structure validity and also reliability. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis also showed that the structure of the questionnaire has an acceptable fit with the data. These factors were named in accordance with the main research, body awareness and sense; location of body in space; relation of object to self, other objects and people; conservation of space; Visual-logical reasoning; Representational thought; their coefficients of internal consistency were 0.83, 0.79, 0.67, 0.80, 0.72 and 0.61, respectively. These results show that the Visuopatial development Questionnaire can be used as a tool for measuring the concept of the visuospatial development in Iran.