Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of Visuospatial Thinking in STEM

Overview Using chemistry as a case study, we propose to discover the relative contribution of three mechanisms for visuospatial representation and transformation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM): domain-specific chunking, domain-general compression skills, and raw visuospatial capacity. A deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in spatial thinking will lead directly to better pedagogy and curricular design for teaching spatial thinking in STEM classrooms. This project focuses on spatial thinking because it is a critical component of cognition in the STEM domains. This centrality of spatial thinking in STEM practice has made it an important focus of research on STEM learning in K-16 settings and spurred efforts to improve STEM success in students by training spatial abilities. Unfortunately, to date, none of these efforts have yielded lasting results. We argue that these spatial training programs have been largely ineffective because they are based on an impoverished model of the cognitive capacities and processes underlying spatial thinking, both generally and in discipline-based education research. The current focus on spatial training programs has concentrated mainly on assessing and improving the types of spatial thinking processes measured by traditional measures of spatial ability, with little attention to how spatial information is actually processed by the STEM learner. Spatial thinking in STEM requires students to encode and transform complex spatial information depicted in disciplinary representations despite known capacity limits of spatial working memory. Understanding these limits and how spatial information is encoded and transformed differently by STEM novices and experts presents new avenues to addressing the challenges students face navigating STEM curricula. Intellectual Merit Spatial thinking is critical for learning and problem solving in STEM disciplines. Studies have shown that spatial ability is important