Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of Visuospatial Thinking in STEM

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A team of researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of California - Santa Barbara will investigate spatial thinking in STEM fields. Students and scientists who are talented in STEM fields also tend to a high capacity for spatial imagination -- they score highly on tasks that ask them to imagine rotations of shapes, or predict how shapes will look when they are folded. But attempts to train these abilities have not translated to substantial improvement in STEM talents. This may be because current training focuses on rote practice, assuming that it is possible to improve the capacity of someone's spatial imagination. In contrast, this may be not possible -- even STEM experts may not have a substantially higher raw capacity for spatial imagination, compared to the average person. The research will test the exciting possibility that their available imagination 'machinery' is similar, but that experts have learned a set of strategies for using that same capacity far more efficiently. The studies will focus on the domain of chemistry, and will ask novices and experts to remember and transform objects that are both unfamiliar (abstract shapes) and familiar (molecules), in experiments designed to unpack the contributions of raw capacity versus a set of predicted strategies. If the studies can isolate the strategies that these STEM experts use to move beyond their capacity limits, then those strategies could be taught in chemistry classrooms. The same principles could extend to other domains as well, such as physics, geoscience, and algebra. This discovery would substantially enhance science and engineering education programs at all levels, strengthening the scientific and engineering research potential of our students. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning. Success in STEM is correlated with spatial thinking ability, yet attempts to train spatial ability (e.g., with mental rotation or paper folding tasks) have led to little improvement in STEM outcomes. These spatial training programs may be ineffective because they are based on an impoverished model of the cognitive and visuospatial capacities processes underlying spatial thinking, both generally and in discipline-based education research. The present research will unpack spatial ability into three hypothesized mechanisms, to isolate where training might be best focused, using a set of controlled laboratory tasks that ask novices (undergraduates) and experts to encode and transform both unfamiliar/abstract and molecular stimuli. With chemistry as a case study, this project will unravel the relative contribution of three potential mechanisms for visuospatial representation and transformation: domain-specific chunking (using long-term memory representations of frequently-encountered chunks), domain-general compression skills (recognizing and leveraging redundancies such as repeated identities or planes of symmetry), and raw visuospatial capacity (the ability to store and transform any abstract set of points or shapes). A deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in spatial thinking would lead directly to better pedagogy and curriculum design for teaching spatial thinking in kindergarten through undergraduate STEM classrooms.