Book

Making Space

Abstract: (from ERIC abstract): This book deals with the development of the child’s notion about space. The authors’ investigations have been concerned with the order and manner in which children begin to imagine or visualize the various spatial entities and

: Given this depiction of some of the operations of spatial thinking in geoscience, we can characterize spatial thinking as consisting of five major processes. These linked operations begin with observing, describing, recording, classifying, recognizing, remembering, and communicating the two-

: Spatial thinking serves three purposes. It has (1) a descriptive function, capturing, preserving, and conveying the appearances of and relations among objects; (2) an analytic function, enabling an understanding of the structure of objects; and (3) an inferential function,

: The basis for spatial thinking is the structure of space and the operations that we can perform on and in that structure. We can think about spatial structure and spatial operations from a number of perspectives, each of which

: Although vision dominates the process and language of spatial thinking for most people, spatial thinking is not restricted to the visual modality: it is multimodal. Whatever the sense modality of the representation, its contents can be scanned (to gain

…we can order component tasks of spatial thinking in terms of relative difficulty. The first and easiest step is extracting spatial structures. This process of pattern description involves identifying relations between the components of a spatial representation and understanding them

: It is the concept of space that makes spatial thinking a distinctive form of thinking. By understanding the meanings of space, we can use its properties (e.g., dimensionality, continuity, proximity, separation) as a vehicle for structuring problems, finding answers,

: To think spatially entails knowing about (1) space—for example, the relationships among units of measurement (e.g., kilometers versus miles), different ways of calculating distance (e.g., miles, travel time, travel cost), the basis of coordinate systems (e.g., Cartesian versus polar