Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)

空间智能与学习中心（SILC）汇集了来自天普大学、西北大学、芝加哥大学、宾夕法尼亚大学、以及芝加哥公立学校追求理解空间学习的总体目标，并利用这些知识开发将改变教育实践的项目和技术，并支持所有儿童和青少年发展在全球经济中竞争所需技能的能力。研究人员联盟包括来自认知科学、心理学、计算机科学、教育和神经科学的个人，以及对各自领域的空间思维特别感兴趣的地球科学家和工程师，以及芝加哥公立学校的教师。空间思维是认知科学中的一个关键理论问题，也是科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）学科中解决问题的一个至关重要的方面。空间智能使我们能够对物体及其位置的信息进行编码和转换，从而在世界上找到我们的方式，并进行技术活动，如工具制造。它还为广泛的推理和沟通技能提供了基础，如建筑设计，数学问题的解决方案，以及在复杂领域的心理模型中使用空间隐喻。因此，各个STEM学科的进步和表现需要关注提高人们对空间结构及其属性的推理能力。更一般地说，在21世纪，一个知情的公民必须能够流畅地处理空间抽象，包括图形、图表和其他可视化。该中心的研究活动旨在提供能够提高空间功能水平的知识，并减少空间功能方面的性别和社会经济差异。SILC的更广泛的影响包括产生一个新的草图理解系统（称为CogSketch），它可以支持新的教学模式，产生一个新的评估单元来评估学龄前和小学的空间技能发展，设计增强课程以丰富3至10岁儿童的空间教学内容。以及开发更强大的方法来教授地球科学和工程学，这些方法可能广泛适用于其他STEM学科。SILC还包括跨学科培训机会，涵盖从高中生到初级科学家的教育范围；以会议和夏季讲习班的形式与职前和在职教师进行接触；与STEM学科的大学教学相结合；主持科学会议；国际范围的访问科学家项目；与儿童和科学博物馆合作。

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.