Making spatial pedagogy: using insights from spatial ability research to develop maker education pedagogy

Abstract

Maker education has been shown to effectively raise children's interest for STEM subjects. Creative maker activities, which mostly take place in informal learning environments such as museums and libraries, hold potential to teach children scientific concepts and train cognitive abilities that are critical to success in engineering in an engaging way. One of these often-overlooked skills fundamental to STEM is spatial ability, which is known to commonly function as a gateway skill to STEM disciplines. Spatial ability is malleable, and training can effect gains not only in psychometrically assessed spatial ability but also in mathematical skills, further demonstrating its importance to STEM learning. In practice maker education often lacks explicit pedagogical attention to the development of scientific skills and cognitive abilities such as spatial ability, instead overemphasising technological skills, and thus limiting its potential to increase learning related to science and engineering. Therefore, maker education practice would greatly benefit from a pedagogy that recognises spatial elements and scaffolds spatial ability development. In this paper the opposing pedagogies that lie at the roots of the maker education and spatial ability education are examined, as a prerequisite step to redesigning maker education practice. The final aim is to transform maker education practice into a STEM learning practice through which spatial ability development is scaffolded and can be assessed. This would help realise maker education's potential for scientific learning and may help a wider audience to meaningfully partake in STEM-related activities from a young age.