Efficacy of Cognitive Empowerment Program: Embodiment Approach for Enhancing Pre-Mathematical Skills and Visual-Spatial Working Memory in Preschool Children

The primary objective of this study was to devise and validate a cognitive empowerment program grounded in the Embodiment approach and to investigate its effectiveness in enhancing pre-mathematical skills and visual-spatial working memory in preschool children. The chosen research methodology was a semiexperimental design consisting of a pre-test/post-test comparison with a control group. The purpose of the research was to address practical concerns, and the data collection method employed a mixed (qualitative-quantitative) approach. The target population consisted of 5 to 7-year-old preschool children residing in Tehran, and a total of 30 participants (15 experimental and 15 control groups) were selected through a multi-stage cluster sampling technique and randomly assigned to either the experimental or control groups. In the subsequent phase of the study, two assessments were administered as a pre-test to the participants: the Basic Mathematics Skills test developed by Kohan Sedgh (1997) and the Visual-Spatial Working Memory tasks, specifically the mazes memory and block recall components, from the Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C) by Pickering & Gathercole (2001). To evaluate the proposed hypotheses, the MANCOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Covariance) and ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance) statistical analyses were implemented using the SPSS 25 software. The findings of the study revealed a significant impact of the cognitive empowerment program with the embodied approach on enhancing pre-mathematical skills in several domains, namely numbers and operations, measurement, basic calculations, and geometry. Additionally, the program was found to have a positive effect on the visual-spatial working memory subtest. Based on these results, it can be surmised that the cognitive empowerment program, grounded in the Embodied Approach, engages multiple systems – including the nervous, sensory, motor, and cognitive systems – simultaneously through direct involvement in physical and movement experiences.