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Is Mental Rotation the Foundational Spatial Skill?. Sheryl Sorby, Kedmon Hungwe, & Tom Drummer Michigan Technological University. Components of Spatial Skills. No agreement on the number of distinct spatial skills Maier identified five factors for spatial cognition: Spatial perception
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Is Mental Rotation the Foundational Spatial Skill? Sheryl Sorby, Kedmon Hungwe, & Tom Drummer Michigan Technological University
Components of Spatial Skills • No agreement on the number of distinct spatial skills • Maier identified five factors for spatial cognition: • Spatial perception • Visualization • Mental rotation • Space relations • Spatial orientation • All of these factors appear to incorporate mental rotation
Current Study • Instrument developed consisting of 10 items each from: • Mental Cutting Test • Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (similar to Maier’s component 3) • Differential Aptitude Test: Space Relations (similar to Maier’s component 2) • Modified Lappan Test (similar to Maier’s component 5) • Test administered to students in Middle and High School courses
Test Correlations - University Students • At Michigan Tech, between MCT and PSVT:R, r=0.47 (n=109, p<0.0001) • At Penn State Erie, Blasko found r(334)=0.24, p<0.001 between water level and mental rotation • No significant correlation between paper folding and either water level or mental rotation
Test Correlations • Strong correlations exist between spatial components • Appear to be trending downward as a student ages • As educational paths diverge, students may develop different, non-visual, methods for solving spatial tasks • e.g., paper folding,
Training with High School Students • Students in high school geometry course completed four modules as part of their geometry course: • Isometric Sketching • Orthographic Projection • Rotation of objects about one axis • Rotation of objects about two or more axes • Instruction from modules 1 & 2 corresponded to items from Lappan test • Instruction from modules 3 & 4 corresponded to items from PSVT:R
Educational Implications • NCTM includes spatial reasoning as part of the national math standards for K-12 • Most teachers assert there is not time in the curriculum to add a significant spatial component • If mental rotation is the foundation of spatial cognition, training efforts could be focused for maximum effectiveness
Conclusions • Test correlations seem to indicate that there is an underlying spatial intelligence factor • Training in mental rotations appears to improve performance in a variety of spatial tasks • Further study is required
Acknowledgement • The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this work of the National Science Foundation through grant number HRD-0429020