The Role Of Spatial Thinking In The Mathematics And Science Standards

by James Loesch

In the current educational environment one important place to look for attention to spatial thinking is in the educational standards for various disciplines. These discipline-based standards. developed in the middle to late 1990s. provide statements of what K-12 students should know, understand, and be able to do; they are intended to serve as a basis for the development of curricula. assessment procedures, teacher-training programs, and supplementary instructional material. The committee focused on two sets of standards:

1. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, prepared by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 2000. This is an update of the first-ever set of standards. those published for mathematics in 1989.

2. National Science Education Standards, prepared by the National Research Council in 1996. Several sets of standards were examined, including those for geography (Geography Education Standards Project, 1994), but the mathematics and science standards offer a direct connection to spatial thinking and reasoning and they are fundamental to the process of education and to the idea of a technologically skilled workforce.

As is the case for most education standards, these two sets of standards are organized in terms of intellectual themes with progressively more challenging standards of performance established for different grade levels along each theme. For example, the science standards are built around eight intellectual categories: unifying concepts and processes in science, science as inquiry, physi. al science, life science, Earth and space science, science and technology, science in personal and social perspectives, and the history and nature of science. For each category there is a content standard and “as a result of activities provided for all students in those grade levels, the content of the standard is to be understood or certain abilities are to be developed” (NRC, 1996, p. 6). In the case of the first category, there is no distinction by grade level; for the other seven categories. understanding is organized into three grade clusters: K-4, 5-8. and 9-12. The eight standards are to he used as a whole in order to achieve scientific literacy.

There are two questions about the relationship between spatial thinking and the sets of content standards: (1) Are the basic tenets of spatial thinking an explicit part of the expectations established by various standards? (2) Are spatial thinking concepts implicitly contained within the standards? To answer these questions, the committee considers the two sets of standards in sequence, begin. ning with mathematics because it has been in place since 1989 in its original form.

Learning things is not limited to the scentific area. Instead it also has relations with some other things like speaking a language or using software, including Rosetta Stone Arabic and Rosetta Stone Chinese. If you have a creative mind, you will make all your own differences in the end!