The Importance of Spatial Ability

In this article in American Educator, Nora Newcombe (Temple University) says that spatial ability is definitely correlated with student success in science and math, and boys, on average, are better than girls at visualizing objects in space. The good news is that spatial ability is not fixed at birth; it can be improved through specific instructional activities. Doing this would significantly boost the number of young people of both genders who are on track to be engineers. Here are some of those strategies:

• Include art projects in the curriculum – For example, when young children create an Ojo de Dios by weaving yarn around two sticks, their arithmetic skills improve. “Art programs have an effect on older students as well,” says Newcombe. “In high school, students taking visual arts gained more in geometry knowledge over the year than students in theater courses or involved in playing squash.” 

• Teach students how to read diagrams. Teachers often assume that students can read the diagrams in their science textbooks, but many students need explicit instruction on how to make sense of the arrows, zoom-outs, cutaways, captions, and legends.

• Encourage students to sketch. “Scientists often draw as they make observations, or as they strive to develop ideas in conversations with other scientists,” says Newcombe. Students should be encouraged to do the same: “it enhances engagement, deepens understanding, requires reasoning, forces ideas to be made explicit, and supports communication in workgroups.”

• Use maps and tools from geographic information systems. One of the most powerful examples of this was John Snow’s famous map of cholera deaths and city pumps in 19^th century London (see the article link below for a reproduction of the map). A number of websites offer middle- and high-school projects – for example, determining the best locations for bears in a national park, the best locations for wind farms on the East Coast of the United States, and transportation routes in the Roman Empire. Here are some sites: www.myworldgis.org/myworld, www.esri.com/Industries/k-12/education/educators, www.isat.jmu.edu/geospatialsemester, and www.stanford.io/XyK0SY. 

• Support students in understanding very large and very small spaces and times. “Scale comprehension is difficult,” says Newcombe. Science constantly challenges students – tiny atoms and vast galaxies, nanoseconds and the age of the Earth. In social studies, students have to understand the distances among cultures, and economics involves numbers that are beyond everyday comprehension. Newcombe and her colleagues worked with students to nest their lifetime within the history of the U.S., then within recorded history, then within the life of the planet, and so on, which helped students’ understanding of how everything fits together.

“Seeing Relationships: Using Spatial Thinking to Teach Science, Mathematics, and Social 

Studies” by Nora Newcombe in American Educator, Spring 2013 (Vol. 37, #1, p. 26-31, 40), 

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2013/Newcombe.pdf

From the Marshall Memo #480