Education for Spatial Thinking

Cognition and Instruction

2007

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To investigate children's ability to translate between the environment and an abstract representation, fourth graders were asked to indicate the location of colored flags by placing similarly colored stickers on a map. In the explaining condition, students wrote down what clues they had used; in the baseline condition, they placed stickers without explanation. The explaining students significantly outperformed the baseline students, especially with respect to egregious errors indicative of failure to understand basic representational correspondence. The hypothesized interpretation is that children who generated explanations were more likely to notice and then correct discrepancies between their answers in progress and the referent space and that they did so by activating existing spatial and symbolic competencies.Becoming a skilled user of maps in the real world is not an easy cognitive task. When people look around them, they see a world that is constantly changing: day to night, season to season, and minute to minute. They perceive a landscape of millions of tiny details: blades of grass, cracks in the sidewalk, ripples on the pond. They look horizontally out across the landscape, from a vantage point 4 or 5 ft (ap-

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Flag-sticker Field-based Map Skills Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Cognition and Instruction

2007

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“…The basic research motivation for the study was to deepen our understanding of how people perceive and make use of correspondences between a spatial representation and its referent (Liben, 1997(Liben, , 1999(Liben, , 2006. The educational motivation was to inform the development of instructional approaches that foster strategies that work well and discourage those that work poorly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's strategies and difficulties while using a map to record locations in an outdoor environment

International Research in Geographical and Environmental Educat

2010

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A foundational skill for all field-based sciences is the ability to accurately record the location of field observations onto a map. To investigate the strategies children use when recording their observations during field-based inquiries, fourth graders were asked to indicate the location of colored flags by placing similarly colored stickers on a map and, after each placement, to write down what clues they used to decide where to place each sticker. This flag-sticker task simulates the way field scientists use maps, as, for example, when ecologists record animal sightings. Participants used a rich vocabulary of spatial descriptors, drawing on topological and projective spatial concepts. No one reported using the available graphic scale or directional arrow. For inaccurately placed stickers, the accompanying verbal reports suggest that, most commonly, students attended to irrelevant or insufficient information in the environment. The hypothesized interpretation is that students have not fully mastered the skill of selectively attending to task-relevant information in a visually complex landscape. Findings imply that instructors should anticipate students' difficulty in identifying, gathering and combining task-relevant information from the environment; model how to identify viable landmarks in the context of the map at hand and combine multiple pieces of spatial information; and require that students describe locations verbally in addition to plotting them on a map.

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“…In this group, the modal response was to point in the facing direction. Although only six participants account for this mode, the finding is nevertheless noteworthy because it suggests the persistence of the childish idea that north is necessarily straight ahead of one's own body (Liben, 2006). Students with under-developed spatial concepts (low WLG) appear to be especially susceptible to this egocentric response.…”

Section: Observed Behaviors and Inferred Processesmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…There is also Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 20:25 10 October 2014 evidence that training specific spatial skills thought to be directly relevant to a particular curriculum can have a positive effect on course grades and on retention in the program as in curricula aimed at teaching 3D visualization skills in engineering (Sorby & Baartmans, 2000), geology (Piburn et al, 2005), and chemistry (Tuckey, Selvaratnam, & Bradley, 1991). At the same time, some seemingly well-designed programs have had little impact (see Liben, 2006) and thus far more research is needed to understand what accounts for the size, persistence, and generality of intervention effects.…”

Section: Instructional Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Spatial Foundations of Science Education: The Illustrative Case of Instruction on Introductory Geological Concepts

Cognition and Instruction

Christensen

2011

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