This project is developing and evaluating curricular materials designed to strengthen penetrative thinking skills - the ability to visualize spatial relations within an object - among geoscience students. The curricular materials being developed by this project build on prior successful models that have improved and enhanced the mental rotation skills of engineering students through a variety of exercises. The investigators are producing and assessing two sets of exercises for students. First, online workbook exercises require students to visualize slices through a variety of objects, both geological and non-geological. These exercises build from simple to complex, thus scaffolding students' penetrative thinking skills. Second, classroom gesture exercises are also being developed via collaborations between geoscience instructors and cognitive scientists to study and enhance visualization abilities of students and to better learn how students use their hands and arms to represent various geological features. Collectively, these exercises are being field-tested in three different undergraduate geoscience classes (mineralogy, sedimentology, and structural geology) at three different institutions utilizing a well-designed formative assessment process that is increasing the overall effectiveness of the project. In addition, a parallel set of supplemental online resources for instructors, including a summary of research on spatial reasoning and learning and recommended strategies for using the workbook exercises and the gesture exercises with their classes, is being developed and disseminated. Being able to successfully visualize the interior of objects at all scales is a core geoscience skill. However, the penetrative thinking abilities of undergraduate geoscience students are known to vary from excellent to poor, in part as a function of gender and socioeconomic status. Consequently, the curricular materials being developed by this project are expanding the pool of students who can succeed in geoscience by helping students with poor penetrative thinking skills overcome that barrier to success. Spatial thinking is known to be an essential component for success in a wide variety of fields, including a variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. Thus, the project's focus on developing spatial skills, independent of content, in a way that transfers those skills to new settings, is enhancing the ability of students to persist and excel in various STEM fields. Consequently, the project is providing adoptable models for other disciplines and is enhancing the overall effectiveness of the STEM workforce.
