Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)

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The Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) brings together scientists and educators from Temple University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chicago Public Schools to pursue the overarching goal of understanding spatial learning and using this knowledge to develop programs and technologies that will transform educational practice and support the capability of all children and adolescents to develop the skills required to compete in a global economy. The consortium of researchers includes individuals from cognitive science, psychology, computer science, education, and neuroscience, as well as practicing geoscientists and engineers who are particularly interested in spatial thinking in their fields, and teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. Spatial thinking is a key theoretical issue in cognitive science, as well as a critically important aspect of problem solving in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Spatial intelligence allows us to encode and transform information about objects and their location, and thus to find our way in the world and perform technical activities such as tool making. It also provides the foundation for a wide range of reasoning and communication skills, as varied as the design of buildings, the solution of mathematics problems, and the use of spatial metaphor in mental models of complex domains. Progress and performance in various STEM disciplines thus requires attention to improving people's ability to reason about spatial configurations and their properties. More generally, an informed citizen in the 21st century must be fluent at processing spatial abstractions including graphs, diagrams, and other visualizations. The SILC research activities are aimed to provide knowledge that can increase levels of spatial functioning, as well as reduce gender and socio-economic differences in spatial functioning. The broader impacts of SILC include the production of a new sketch understanding system (to be called CogSketch) that can support new modes of teaching, the production of a new assessment battery to assess spatial skills as they develop in preschool and elementary school, the design of curricular enhancements to enrich spatial content in teaching children from 3 to 10 years of age, and the development of more powerful methods for teaching geoscience and engineering that may be broadly applicable to other STEM disciplines. SILC also includes cross-disciplinary training opportunities that span the educational spectrum from high school students to junior scientists; outreach to pre-service and in-service teachers in the form of conferences and summer workshops; interfaces with university teaching in the STEM disciplines; hosting of scientific conferences; visiting scientist programs of international scope; and, partnerships with children's and science museums.