Spatial Thinking in Science and Education

Key Ideas

  • Spatial thinking skills are a group of abilities that involve mentally picturing and manipulating objects.
  • Spatial thinking skills impact many school outcomes, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) abilities. New research suggests it may also impact language arts skills.
  • Educators can identify components of lessons that require spatial thinking and add supports to their instruction with relative ease.

What is Spatial Thinking?

Eukaryotic cell diagram, top view of inside structures
Eukaryotic cell diagram, top view of inside structures (Credit: lvcandy)

When you picture how a room would look after rearranging furniture, plan a route from point A to point B, or imagine designing a craft or project, you are using spatial thinking skills. Spatial thinking skills are a group of abilities that involve mentally picturing and manipulating objects. These skills are utilized to learn topics at every level: Young children may picture a number line to add or subtract, while middle school students study diagrams of cell organelles, and high school physics students visualize the movements of individual particles to understand the motion of waves. Even at the postgraduate level, medical students’ understanding of anatomy is supported by their ability to imagine spatial relations of bones and muscles. As these examples demonstrate, spatial thinking skills are heavily intertwined with STEM.

What does the research say?

Years of educational neuroscience research have found a couple of interesting relationships between spatial thinking and STEM. First, there is a strong positive correlation between spatial thinking abilities and STEM success, where those who have stronger spatial thinking skills perform better in STEM1. Second, studies have shown that this connection is causal: improving spatial thinking skills improves success on STEM activities and assessments2. However, it is not yet time to advocate for the use of spatial thinking interventions in hopes of improving STEM scores. While a meta-analysis summarizing findings from other studies2 found that spatial thinking interventions can transfer effects to tasks in STEM domains, some individual studies have found only weak support for the impact of those improvements on school learning.

Furthermore, though the majority of studies focus on the relationship between spatial thinking and math or science, a recent study has found a similarly strong bond between spatial skills and Language Arts test scores 3. This may indicate that the relationship between STEM achievement and spatial thinking skills may be driven by a third factor that has not yet been found. If this were true, then it would be precipitous to create a curriculum solely for spatial thinking skills prior to discovering the external influence. While more research is needed to support what—if any—spatial thinking lessons should be created, it is clear that spatial thinking skills are essential for academic performance on a breadth of subjects throughout the years.

What can I do?

Eukaryotic cell diagram, vector illustration, text on own layer
Eukaryotic cell diagram, vector illustration, text on own layer (Credit:jack0m)

Educators can still support their students’ spatial thinking in the context of relevant topics, however. I can still remember my shock when I realized—embarrassingly late—that cells were three-dimensional sphere-like shapes, not pancake-shaped. Prior to seeing an illustration of a spherical cell from an outside angle, I took textbook illustrations of a cell slice at face value. My high school biology teacher’s choice to show a depiction that indicated the three-dimensional nature of the cell enabled me to more deeply (and correctly) understand cells.

To support your students’ spatial thinking, you can first identify when it might need to be utilized. Some subjects, such as geography and geometry, contain a plethora of concrete spatial information. Other subjects may represent spatial concepts abstractly: for example, most people imagine positive numbers to the right and negative numbers to the left (or up and down, respectively.) Spatial thinking skills help us understand these topics, so those with lower spatial abilities may be at a disadvantage. Whether spatial concepts in your topic are concrete or abstract, there are a number of ways to bolster your students’ spatial thinking skills and deepen their understanding.

Concrete spatial concepts (i.e. geometry, geography, biology, etc…)

  • Concretely represent the spatial relations (i.e. point to areas on maps or gesture to show relations, instead of only using language to describe relative locations)
  • Show multiple perspectives on the same object; bonus points if you include multiple types of media
    Ask students to imagine what an asymmetrical object (i.e. the heart) would look like from a different point of view

Abstract spatial concepts (i.e. number concepts, chemistry, etc…)

  • Think of ways to represent the concepts concretely (fraction manipulatives are a common example in 4th grade.) Such representations can be used physically with younger students and as analogies with older students.
  • Explicitly draw attention to spatial relationships and organization (in chemistry, e.g., describe not only bonds and attraction, but how those affect particles’ relative (hypothetical) positions)

Bibliography

1 Wai, J., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2009). Spatial Ability for STEM Domains: Aligning Over 50 Years of Cumulative Psychological Knowledge Solidifies Its Importance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(4), 817–835.

2 Uttal, D. H., Meadow, N. G., Tipton, E., Hand, L. L., Alden, A. R., Warren, C., & Newcombe, N. S. (2013). The malleability of spatial skills: A meta-analysis of training studies. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 352–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028446

3 Rutherford, T., Karamarkovich, S. M., & Lee, D. S. (2018). Is the spatial/math connection unique? Associations between mental rotation and elementary mathematics and English achievement. Learning and Individual Differences, 62, 180–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2018.01.014

Images retrieved from Unsplash

Image 1—Eukaryotic cell diagram, top view of inside structures; Credit: lvcandyLargest; size:Vector (EPS) – Scalable to any size; Stock illustration ID:488721125; Upload date:May 07, 2014

Image 2—Eukaryotic cell diagram, vector illustration, text on own layer; Credit:jack0m; Largest size:Vector (EPS) – Scalable to any size; Stock illustration ID:1155003177; Upload date:June 10, 2019

Image 3—Seeking solutions in the maze-shaped human brain, 3D – Computer generated image; Credit:syolacan; Largest size: 5250 x 3500 px (17.50 x 11.67 in.) – 300 dpi – RGB; Stock photo ID:1291371216; Upload date:December 22, 2020

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Christine Bresnahan is an educator with a passionate drive to reduce the barriers that impede the learning of students with diverse learning needs. She is currently a PhD student studying individual differences in spatial thinking skills, specifically in people with dyslexia, in the Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience program at American University. She first developed her interest in educational neuroscience and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned her Master of Education. She then taught as a special educator at a public elementary school in Massachusetts for six years, and has presented for over a decade at schools and conferences about how educators can support the learning of students at various ages and abilities.

One thought on “Spatial Thinking in Science and Education

  1. “Exploring the realms of ‘Spatial Thinking in Science and Education’ opens up a fascinating journey into the power of visualization and spatial reasoning. In a world that relies heavily on technology and spatial understanding, this topic promises insights that could shape the way we learn and perceive the world around us. Looking forward to expanding my horizons through this exploration!”

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