Understanding spatial literacy: cognitive and curriculum perspectives

Abstract

There are a variety of definitions of spatial ability or literacy all of which can be applied to activities and processes undertaken within the GEES disciplines. Linn and Petersen (1985) define spatial ability as a general skill in “representing, transforming, generating and recalling symbolic, nonlinguistic information”. Eliot and Smith’s definition of spatial ability (1983: quoted in Ishikawa and Kastens, 2005) specifies “the perception and retention of visual forms and the mental manipulation and reconstruction of visual shapes.” With respect to geosciences, Kastens and Ishikawa (2006) describe spatial thinking as “recognizing, observing, recording, describing, classifying, remembering, and communicating the two- or threedimensional shapes, structures, orientations, and positions of objects, properties, or processes; mentally manipulating those shapes, structures, orientations, and positions by rotation, translation, deformation, or partial removal; making interpretations about why the objects, properties, or processes have those particular shapes, structures, orientations, and positions; making predictions about the consequences or implications of the observed shapes, structures, orientations, and positions; and using spatial thinking as a short cut or metaphor to think about the distribution of processes or properties across some dimension other than length-space.”