This project, hosted at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (L-DEO) of Columbia University, is creating and testing a professional development program for Earth Science teachers targeted at improving the spatial thinking of Earth Science students. "Spatial thinking" in this context involves envisioning or manipulating or drawing meaning from the position, shape, orientation, trajectory, or configuration of objects or phenomena. Extracting insight from 2-D spatial representations, such as maps, diagrams, and profiles, and envisioning 3-D processes, such as causes of seasons, eclipses and tides, are examples of spatial thinking. Spatial thinking is rarely assessed or taught in conventional courses in the U.S. education system; however, research shows that it is an essential foundational skill for science, in general, and Earth Science, in particular. New York State Earth Science teachers participating in L-DEO's Earth2Class workshop series are co-developers/participants in the program. Teachers learn to diagnose students' spatial difficulties and develop strategies to support students' spatial thinking. Focus topics have been chosen through analysis of spatially-challenging elements of the NY State Earth Science Core Curricula and associated assessments, and reflect thinking skills used by geoscientists in research and practical applications. Topics include: "What is spatial thinking and why is it important?"; "Making inferences from patterns"; "Adding the 3rd dimension: profiles, cross-sections and block diagrams"; "Scale: why size matters; Perspective taking and projections".
"Spatial Thinking" is thinking that requires using information about where things are, where one thing is relative another thing, how thing are moving relative to each other, how things are shaped, how things look from other vantage points, how shape and position change over time, and related concepts. Spatial thinking is known to be important in science, and especially in Earth & Space Sciences. When you think about the phases of the moon, and how the moon would look from different vantage points, that is spatial thinking. In this project, we investigated how spatial thinking is used in standardized tests and curricula designed for pre-college Earth Science courses. The focus was on the Regents Earth Science curriculum in New York State, but results from the project can be applied to other K-12 and undergraduate program. The Regents Earth Science exam is taken by more than 160,000 students annually, and has been in place for decades. This makes it the most widely studied and longest-running Earth Science education program in the nation. We began by developing a coding schema to categorize the "spatialness" of more than 1000 test items from twelve recent Regents exams. Each item was assessed for "Spatial Concepts," "Spatial Representations," and "Spatial Skills." "Spatial Concepts" include position, configuration, distance, direction, motion, trajectory, size, shape, gradient, cycle, etc. "Spatial Representations" include maps, cross-sections, profiles, block diagrams, photographs, and graphs. "Spatial Skills" involve perspective taking, sequencing, mental animation, visual penetrative ability, representational correspondence, and describing a spatial phenomenon. We also developed criteria to exclude test items as non-spatial. We found that well over half of the items on the exams required one or more kinds of spatial thinking, and that, on average, student scores were lower on the spatial items than on the non-spatial items. Using what we had learned during our analysis of the exam, we ran a series of workshops for teachers during the 2011 – 2012 academic year, in conjunction with the Earth2Class Workshops for Teachers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (www.earth2class.org). Workshop participants learned about various facets of spatial thinking, and worked on activities that students can do to improve both their spatial thinking and their geoscience knowledge. Our work is societally relevant because we help students learn to think about their home planet. Our project has intellectual merit because we are working at the interface between disciplines, using a concept from cognitive science to improve geoscience education.
