Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) are addressing a blind-spot in American education. In a digital era that increasingly represents information visually as maps, graphs, and schematic images, many educators now recognize the need to complement traditional numerical/verbal literacy with an emphasis on spatial thinking. Spatial thinking integrates an understanding of concepts, such as distance, direction, scale, and pattern recognition, with the effective use of visual representations and spatial technologies, such as GPS and geographic information systems (GIS), to solve societal problems and to advance science.
This project is addressing the need to embed spatial thinking in education with a new portal(http://teachspatial.org). TeachSpatial is a small-grant National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathways project that promotes discussion of spatial literacy among educators and provides guided access to relevant NSDL learning resources to help teachers integrate spatial thinking into course curricula for science and math-based disciplines. The TeachSpatial project is making explicit those spatial learning objectives that are implicit in existing science and math standards at the secondary level and is documenting a baseline for mastery of spatial concepts by new undergraduates. TeachSpatial is enabling instructors working as pioneers for spatial thinking to find resources (course syllabi, exercises, linked datasets, and exemplar applications) within NSDL, to access and contribute learning modules that promote spatial thinking and spatial computational reasoning, to exchange experiences and pedagogical strategies, and to offer evaluations of specific learning resources.
The TeachSpatial project has developed a website that is a "spatial lens" on the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Cataloging more than 140,000 high-quality digital teaching resources from around the United States and the world, NSDL makes these resources available at http://NSDL.org and through the websites of many discipline-specific "Pathway" projects, such as ComPADRE (physics), BEN (biological sciences) and DLESE (earth sciences). Now available, the TeachSpatial site (http://teachspatial.org) provides directed access to resources for all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects that are particularly useful for the effective teaching and learning of spatial concepts, principles, and skills. Spatial literacy has become an essential focus in science education and in cognitive science research, because student performance in STEM subjects has been shown to depend on the ability to master spatial thinking and reasoning tasks. Many spatial concepts and principles (e.g., scale, distance, location, structure, shape, and interaction, to name only a few) are transdisciplinary. That is, there is fundamental spatial knowledge that holds for multiple scientific disciplines despite significant disciplinary distinctions in their application (Figure 1). Figure 2 weights concept terms by their presence in the 150 content standards of the National Science Education Standards for the Physical, Life, and Space and Earth Sciences (NSES, 1996), and in the National Geography Standards (National Geographic Society, 1994). Exploring and explaining differences in the role of spatial perspective among knowledge domains is an important research agenda for informing the development and enhancing the value of curricula in K-12 and college education. The TeachSpatial project—a small-grant pilot project intended to seed future research and inform curriculum development and teacher training—has investigated these commonalities and distinctions from several disciplinary perspectives and has developed useful web-based tools to allow educators and students to explore them.
