That is the spatial area and it is an area where some studies have suggested that girls fall off the charts as they hit puberty. The studies vary, but there does seem to be an effect.
These tests are also strongly correlated with anything that improves your spatial reasoning. Is your daughter interested in Lego, Minecraft, baseball, soccer, football, and chess?
If not, there is a VERY good chance that many boys and "nerdy girls" in her cohort have had approximately 5 years of intensive training in spatial reasoning, visual abstract problem solving, and visual details, which she has missed.
Many boys who excel at math and science spend 10-15 more hours per week on video games that train them precisely for this test. Minecraft and Lego could be looked at as one huge spatial logic training ground.
Even without video games, sports and other spatial-training exercises tend to reach boys more, for whatever reason.
It's very common for girls to fall off the cliff in this area especially at puberty. Testosterone also is linked, even among adult men in studies which don't look at women at all, with spatial reasoning, though not linearly:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306453095000518Instead, lower testosterone in women lowers spatial performance. (The scientists don't get it, either.)
Whether this is due to testosterone being linked to participation in sports, or whether participation in sports is linked to spatial and visual abilities which is caused by testosterone, is hotly debated.
The point is, a lot of girls fall behind in spatial tasks around puberty, though the differences have been decreasing in recent years.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/117/2/250/The point is just to say--hormones do play a role in brain development and spatial abilities, so your daughter may be at a stage where her spatial brain isn't getting the majority of the development. It doesn't mean she isn't a spatial thinker, but that she's testing at the wrong time of the year.
(Believe it or not... women's spatial abilities have been linked to the time of the month:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0162309593900219http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/027826269090058VI know about this because I looked into it when choosing the date to take my GREs as an adult. And yes, I believe it worked--I certainly got one of my better scores in math.)
