Defining spatial thinking
The NRC report defines spatial thinking as "a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. Space provides the conceptual and analytical framework within which data can be integrated, related, and structured into a whole. Representations—either internal and cognitive or external and graphic, linguistic, physical, and so forth—provide the forms within which structured information can be stored, analyzed, comprehended, and communicated to others. Reasoning processes provide the means of manipulating, interpreting, and explaining the structured information."
Processes of reasoning are sub-classed as "the component tasks of spatial thinking," per the diagram below.
In exploring various ways for organizing spatial concepts and by extension, the materials on this site, I have these questions:
- Is this definition correct? adequate? are there others you favor?
- Is this sort of organization useful for developing pedagogical strategies?
defining spatial thinking
The problem I've had with the NRC definition is its density. It's comprehensive in a way that makes it difficult to unpack in conversation, and explaining it to people with little background in these ideas is complicated. I made up this alternative definition that works better for me:
"Spatial thinking is an ability to visualize and interpret location, distance, relationships, movement and change through space" (Sinton, 2009).
Several colleagues have suggested that it could also be slightly expanded to, "Spatial reasoning is an ability to visualize and interpret location, distance, relationships, movement and change through space and time."
Diana Sinton
Diana Sinton
University of Redlands
getting there (to simplicity)
I agree about its density, but it deliberately suggests 'spatial thinking' concerns all mental activity regarding space, which includes all the 'pre-reasoning' cognitive activity about spatial and/or spatiotemporal phenomena the psychologists among us are concerned with: perception, mental representations and transformations, conceptualization, etc.
Your colleagues' amended definition of spatial reasoning would seem to address the NRC's more narrow 'processes of reasoning' category, but visualization ability is in large part a natural faculty, and interpretation of spatiotemporal phenomena happens on several levels, from infancy to largely unconscious wayfinding to sophisticated software-aided analyses. So I prefer your broader first definition, because it is appropriately quite general -- but I do like the addition of time!
I'm working at fleshing out the NRC definition (hoping it proves 'sturdy' enough as I go), and one product of that could be better definitions - the idea being if we identify everything in the box, and their relations to each other to some extent, we can summarize the box better. One device I'm using is differentiatiation between internal and external in both the 'representation' and 'reasoning' NRC divisions (e.g. various mental activities vs. computational analysis and map-making), and tieing that to the explicit developmental (Piaget, Tversky) and educational progression (Gersmehl, Golledge) perspectives out there.
Karl Grossner
UC Santa Barbara Geography
question on definiton of spatial thinking
Hello,
I'm new to this forum.
Question about the definitions of spatial thinking - there may be spatial representations that do not represent actual space or time. For example, a "mental map" showing relationships between abstract concepts is a spatial representation, but does not include reasoning about actual space and time - here, we use the analogy of space to clarify a more abstract field. Are these type of spatial representations also included in the definition of spatial thinking?
Thanks!
Orit - Hebrew University