Spatial Thinking Across the Curriculum: Fruitfully Combining Research and Practice

Spatial thinking permeates much of our lives and is an asset when solving problems involving well-structured visual information or imagining solutions in physical or digital space. However, an estimated three million US school children have spatial talents that go unrecognized because of the tools commonly used for identification of academic talent. For decades, educational and psychological research has explored the range of spatial thinking skills that are demanded by many career fields, including science, engineering, and mathematics. Spatial thinking has been found to be particularly important to early mathematical thinking. In this article, we explore what spatial thinking entails, where it is important in the curriculum, and how we can begin to develop spatial literacy and identify spatial talents in our K-12 classrooms.