We talk about our spatial thinking skills all the time, maybe without knowing that there is an entire domain of cognitive skills that connect these observations. Educators can also recognize these skills in our students. These include students who seem to have an intuitive understanding of computer-aided design and create complex and efficient 3-D…

We talk about our spatial thinking skills all the time, maybe without knowing that there is an entire domain of cognitive skills that connect these observations. Educators can also recognize these skills in our students. These include students who seem to have an intuitive understanding of computer-aided design and create complex and efficient 3-D…

Spatial thinking is ubiquitous in design. Design education across all age groups encompasses a range of spatially challenging activities, such as forming and modifying mental representations of ideas, and visualizing the scenarios of design prototypes being used. While extensive research has examined the cognitive processes of spatial thinking and…

Humans excel at detecting patterns in information, abstracting rules, and making inferences. Underlying these skills is relational reasoning: the cognitive ability to identify and map abstract, generalizable relations between pieces of information. Though this powerful ability supports higher-order cognition, it can also be a processing bottleneck…

There are contentious and persistent gender differences reported in some measures of spatial skills, particularly mental rotation and, to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, which may have an impact on mathematics success. Furthermore, pathways between spatial skills and mathematics may be mediated by other cognitive factors, such as fluid…

This paper considers the teachings of spatial thinking in two Danish school interventions with children, ages 10-13 (2018-2021), by turning Lefebvre's spatial triad into a research-based exercise. Based on children's responses, this paper concludes that, first, by allowing children to include their own spatial experiences, they can resonate with…

This paper combines recent developments in theories of knowledge (complex dynamic systems), technologies (embodied interactions), and research tools (multimodal data collection and analysis) to offer new insights into how conceptual mathematical understanding can emerge. A complex dynamic system view models mathematics learning in terms of a…

Game-based learning, which includes non-digital and digital games, highlights the benefits of games in terms of players' learning and engagement. Whereas contemporary research focuses more on digital than non-digital game-based learning, more studies shall compare the effects between the two types of game-based learning and their integration. This…

Situation awareness (SA) is linked with actionable decision-making and clinical judgment in nursing practice. The cognitive processes used in developing SA, outlined in Endsley's (1995) model, is the framework underpinning this study and are interwoven into the National Council of State Boards of Nursing Clinical Judgment Measurement Model…

Geospatial expertise draws on and recognizes a vast array of seemingly unrelated interconnections allowing the geographer to find solutions to otherwise incomprehensible problems. Geospatial thinking involves both time and space, acknowledges cause-and-effect relationships of geographic phenomena at multiple scales, and recognizes the impact of…

This study investigated the effects of 3D model building activities with block codes on students' spatial thinking and computational thinking skills. The study group consists of 5th grade students in a secondary school in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. For the study, a pretestposttest control group was utilized within the experimental…

Angularity is a persistent quantity throughout K-12+ school mathematics, and many studies have shown that individuals often conflate angularity with linear attributes (e.g., the length of an angle model's sides). However, few studies have examined the productive ways in which students might reason about angularity while attending to linear…

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e.,…

This study examined how embodied learning experiences support students to grasp abstract CT concepts in early primary education. Forty-seven students were recruited from first- and second-grade classrooms. They had five embodied activities that simulated robot programming tasks requiring students to (1) figure out a route from a starting point to…

Geometry learning has a long history with the connection to human cognitive development. The ability to mentally or physically orient 2D shapes or 3D objects in space is believed to support achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Thus, geometry by its description is characterised by space; hence its…