Students appear to be able to see number relationships and patterns but have difficulty recognizing the visual properties of shapes, especially if the shapes are in different positions. Their difficulty in the visual and spatial realm is often linked to a lack of drawing experience and possibly undeveloped fine-motor skills. The author, as a…

Business students need to develop skills in the intelligent use of information, especially spatial information, for decision-making. Geographic Information System (GIS) is a viable tool for that purpose. Yet the few GIS courses in the Information Systems curriculum offered in various business schools tend to focus on different concepts and skills.…

This paper reports the findings from an experimental study based on the pretest posttest research design that studied mental rotation (MR) and spatial visualization (SV) training outcomes and their impact on orthographic drawing performance. The sample of the study comprised 98 secondary school students (36 girls, 62 boys, Mage = 15.5 years, age…

Concepts in mathematics are often universally applicable to other fields. A critical aspect for success in high school or college is the ability to transfer content knowledge from one discipline to another. This is especially true for material learned in the sciences and mathematics. Several studies have suggested that strong mathematical skills…

External representations (ERs), such as diagrams, animations, and dynamic models are vital tools for communicating and constructing knowledge in biochemistry. To build a meaningful understanding of structure, function, and process, it is essential that students become visually literate by mastering key cognitive skills that are essential for…

A student might find a certain representational format (e.g., diagram, text) more attractive than other formats for learning. Computer technology offers opportunities to adjust the formats used in learning environments to the preferences of individual learners. The question addressed in the current study was: does the match between a student's…

This paper documents the development of the Geometric Spatial Assessment. We detail the development of this instrument which was designed to identify middle school students' strategies and advancement in understanding of four geometric concept domains (geometric spatial visualization, spatial projection, cardinal directions, and periodic patterns)…

This study examined differences between two groups of students' spatial-scientific reasoning from pre to post implementation of an Earth/Space unit. Using a quasi-experimental design, researchers explored how instructional method and gender affected learning. Treatment teachers employed an integrated STEM curriculum while the control teacher…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a unit plan designed to enhance students' three-dimensional geometry and spatial ability skills. Research participants consisted of 50 students, 19 males and 31 females, and two teachers from a public high school in a suburban middle-class community. The students in this study were 9th and 10th graders…

Visualizing spatial material is a cornerstone of human problem solving, but human visualization capacity is sharply limited. To investigate the sources of this limit, we developed a new task to measure visualization accuracy for verbally-described spatial paths (similar to street directions), and implemented a computational process model to…

Working under classical test theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) frameworks, this study investigated psychometric properties of the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (Revised PSVT:R). The original version, the PSVT:R was designed by Guay (1976) to measure spatial visualization ability in…

The author reviews research on working memory and short-term memory abilities of deaf individuals, delineating strengths and weaknesses. Among the areas of weakness that are reviewed are sequential recall, processing speed, attention, and memory load. Areas of strengths include free recall, visuospatial recall, imagery, and dual encoding.…

This paper attempts to harness the opportunities for mobility and the new user interfaces that handheld touch screen devices offer, in a non-formal learning context, with a view to developing spatial ability. This research has addressed two objectives: first, analyzing the effects that training can have on spatial visualisation using the…

Geologists and undergraduate students observed eight artificial "rock outcrops" in a realistically scaled field area, and then tried to envision a geological structure that might plausibly be formed by the layered rocks in the set of outcrops. Students were videotaped as they selected which of fourteen 3-D models they thought best…

Twelve pentagons are sufficient and necessary to form a fullerene cage. According to this structural feature of fullerenes, we propose a simple and efficient method for the construction of I[subscript h] symmetrical fullerenes from pentagons. This method does not require complicated mathematical knowledge; yet it provides an excellent paradigm for…