Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of Visuospatial thinking in STEM

来自西北大学、伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校和加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的一组研究人员将研究STEM领域的空间思维。在STEM领域有天赋的学生和科学家也往往具有很高的空间想象能力——他们在要求他们想象形状的旋转或预测形状折叠时的样子的任务中得分很高。但是，培养这些能力的尝试并没有转化为STEM人才的实质性提高。这可能是因为目前的训练侧重于死记硬背的练习，假设有可能提高一个人的空间想象能力。相比之下，这可能是不可能的——即使是STEM专家也可能没有比普通人高得多的空间想象能力。这项研究将测试一种令人兴奋的可能性，即他们可用的想象力“机器”是相似的，但专家们已经学会了一套策略，可以更有效地利用同样的能力。这些研究将集中在化学领域，并将要求新手和专家在实验中记住和转换不熟悉（抽象形状）和熟悉（分子）的物体，以揭示原始能力与一组预测策略的贡献。如果这些研究能够分离出这些STEM专家用来超越其能力极限的策略，那么这些策略就可以在化学课堂上教授。同样的原理也可以扩展到其他领域，比如物理、地球科学和代数。这一发现将大大提高各级科学和工程教育计划，加强我们学生的科学和工程研究潜力。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）项目资助，该项目支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作。STEM的成功与空间思维能力相关，然而，试图训练空间能力（例如，心理旋转或折纸任务）并没有导致STEM结果的改善。这些空间训练计划可能是无效的，因为它们是基于认知和视觉空间能力过程的一个贫乏模型，这是空间思维的基础，无论是在一般情况下还是在基于学科的教育研究中。本研究将空间能力分解为三种假设机制，利用一组受控的实验室任务，要求新手（本科生）和专家对不熟悉/抽象和分子刺激进行编码和转换，以隔离训练的最佳重点。以化学为例，该项目将揭示三种潜在的视觉空间表示和转换机制的相对贡献：特定领域的分块（使用经常遇到的块的长期记忆表示），领域通用压缩技能（识别和利用冗余，如重复身份或对称平面），以及原始视觉空间容量（存储和转换任何抽象点或形状集合的能力）。更深入地了解空间思维的机制将直接导致通过本科STEM课堂更好地教授幼儿园空间思维的教学法和课程设计。

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.