Beyond small-scale spatial skills: Navigation skills and geoscience education

Abstract

Background: Research examining the relation between spatial skills and the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields has focused on small-scale spatial skills, even though some STEM disciplines-particularly the geography and geoscience (GEO) fields-involve large-scale spatial thinking at the core of their professional training. In Study 1, we compared large-scale navigation skills of experienced geologists with those of experienced psychologists, using a novel virtual navigation paradigm as an objective measure of navigation skills. In Study 2, we conducted a longitudinal study with novice Geographic Information Systems (GIS) students to investigate baseline navigational competence and improvement over the course of an academic semester.

Results: In Study 1, we found that geologists demonstrated higher navigational competence and were more likely to be categorized as integrating separate routes, compared to their non-STEM counterparts. In Study 2, novice GIS students showed superior baseline navigational competence compared to non-STEM students, as well as better spatial working memory and small-scale mental rotation skills, indicating self-selection. In addition, GIS students' spatial skills improved more over the course of a semester than those of non-STEM students.

Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of large-scale spatial thinking for enrollment and success in the GEO fields but likely also across the broader range of thinking involving spatial distributions. We discuss the potential of GIS tools to develop spatial skills at an early age.

Keywords: Geographic Information Systems; Geology; Navigation; Spatial cognition; Virtual environment.

Fig. 1

Categorization of spatial skills by intrinsic/extrinsic object information and static/dynamic movement information

Fig. 2

Aerial view map of Virtual Silcton showing the two main routes (solid lines A and B), the two connecting routes (dashed lines C and D) and the layout of buildings on each route. The letter–number combinations are used to indicate the start and end points along each of the main and connecting routes (i.e., participants walked from point 1 to point 2 and then back to point 1 for each of the main and connecting routes, thus traversing each route twice). Participants had to learn the names and locations of four target buildings on each of the two main routes. The presentation of the main routes were counterbalanced (A first or B first) and the presentation of the connecting routes were counterbalanced (C first or D first)

Fig. 3

Pointing task. Participants could rotate a virtual crosshair 360^o along the horizontal plane to point in the direction of a target building

Fig. 4

Scatterplot of performance on between-route and within-route pointing trials grouped by geologists and non-STEM undergraduates. Quadrants are based on cluster membership cutoff values—good between/good within (integrators), good between/bad within (non-integrators) and bad between/bad within (imprecise navigators)—established in previous studies using Virtual Silcton (Weisberg & Newcombe, ; Weisberg et al., 2014). STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics

Fig. 5

Change in large-scale navigation and small-scale mental rotation tasks, grouped by participant course. a Within-route pointing error. b Between-route pointing error. c Model-building (R² value). d Mental rotation skill. Overall, GIS participants significantly outperformed COM participants and there was significant improvement in both groups from T1 to T2. In addition, GIS participants improved at a faster rate than COM participants on all measures except the within-route pointing task. Error bars reflect ±1 standard error of the mean. COM Communication, GIS Geographic Information Systems, T1 pre test (start of academic semester), T2 post test (end of academic semester). For within- and between- pointing errors, a low value (error) indicates high accuracy

Fig. 6

Quiver plot of performance on between-route and within-route pointing trials at T1 and T2 grouped by participant course. Arrows depict the magnitude (scaled) and direction of change in performance from T1 to T2. AVG average, COM Communication, GIS Geographic Information Systems, T1 pre test (start of academic semester), T2 post test (end of academic semester)