Creating a Science of Spatial Learning
Nora S. Newcombe
A report from the National Academies, Learning to Think Spatially (2006) was a landmark achievement, making a persuasive case for the importance of spatial thinking and its inclusion in K-12 education. The central premises in this case are that spatial ability is malleable and that it is related to STEM achievement.
While there was already support for these ideas in 2006, the case has since been strengthened. A meta-analysis by Uttal, Meadow, Tipton, Hand, Alden, Warren and Newcombe (2012), showed malleability, and also generalizability and durability of spatial education and training.
The premise of a relation to STEM achievement has been supported for high school students in analyses of large representative samples of high school students studied longitudinally (Wai, Lubinski & Benbow, 2009) and for young children by two longitudinal studies (Gunderson, Ramirez, Beilock and Levine, 2012. Gunderson et al. also discovered a possible mechanism for the predictive relationship they observed, namely that understanding the number line (a spatialization of number) mediated the link between early spatial skill and later mathematics achievement.
doi: 10.1037/a0027433
One challenge for the future is to evaluate the number-line mechanism and to determine if there are other such mechanisms, e.g., spatial thinking in the utilization of maps, diagrams and graphs.
How can spatial learning be improved?While direct training of spatial abilities is one possibility, we can also use spatial analogy, gesture, sketching, spatial language, maps, and diagrams to improve learning across development. Recent research has shown that these spatial processes can improve domain learning from preschool mathematics to college-level physics, chemistry and geoscience. For example, spatial analogical comparison allows preschoolers to abstract new relational patterns (Christie & Gentner, 2010). Additionally, spatial analogies improve children’s understanding of a basic engineering principle in a museum setting. doi:10.1080/15248371003700015
By middle and high school, teaching use of graphs and diagrams becomes important, sketching can become a more formal tool, and GIS technology can be utilized. In college students, spatial experience can improve understanding concepts such as angular momentum in physics, and gesturing can improve understanding of stereoisomers in chemistry. This research has led to a set of spatial learning tools that are readily translatable to education in both formal and informal settings; see Newcombe (2010) for an overview for teachers. An advantage of these spatial learning tools is that they can be incorporated into currently existing curricula.
One challenge for the future is to delineate what techniques work best in what contexts, and how they best work together. Even more generally, we need to ask about the relation between spatial and non-spatial mechanisms -- to explore whether learning mechanisms work in the same way for all concepts or whether spatial skills/mechanisms are better suited to some concepts, non-spatial skills/mechanisms to other concepts.