Establishing International Normative Values for Spatial Thinking Skills Across World’s Cultural Regions: A Multilevel Investigation of Individual and Cultural Factors

Spatial thinking skills are defined as the capacity to perceive, mentally transform, and reason about objects, locations, and spatial relationships.This capacity underpins fundamental competencies such as map reading, geometric reasoning, and scientific visualisation, and directly influences academic achievement in mathematics, science, and social studies, as well as long-term career trajectories and the performance of a wide range of professions (Arıkan, 2026;Uttal et al., 2013;Wai et al., 2009).Despite their recognised importance, research on spatial thinking skills has largely been conducted with small samples drawn from a single country or a few schools, relied predominantly on Western data sets, and remained limited to cross-sectional designs measuring only a single dimension.Most critically, cross-cultural norm values for the 12-18 age range have yet to be established in any published study.