As the twenty-first century marches ever onwards, spatial cognition is increasingly being called on to visualise, invent and understand complex ideas and systems both natural and human-made.
The F-10 Australian Curriculum: Technologies has much to offer spatial literacy education, particularly in the practice of Design and Technologies e.g. getting students to generate 2D nets that fold into 3D geometric shapes, modelling concepts and creating orthographic and isometric projections. The teachings of traditional industrial drawing skills that include scaling, hidden detail drawing, measuring and making in millimetres, estimating, designing and constructing are also very well aligned.
These concrete skills are essential foundational learning that lead to fluency and complex reasoning in spatial literacy. Simoncini and Larkin’s (2017) article ‘Christmas shopping: Why blocks are still the best present you can buy children‘ highlights some crucial points about the importance of spatial literacy education.
The rapid advances in the take up of virtual and augmented reality and various software applications allow us to generate and use spatial learning much more prominently. 3D modelling tools such as Blender, SketchUp, Tinkercad and Tilt Brush help our students advance their spatial skills and to better comprehend how to create and work with geometric shapes. Spatial literacy forms a major part of national assessment programmes such as NAPLAN and the Queensland Core Skills Test. The percentage of targeted questioning in spatial literacy decreases considerably by Year 9 NAPLAN but is quite prominent in past papers for Year 5 NAPLAN.
Numerous research studies have revealed that gender differences in spatial literacies do exist through social, cultural, environmental and psychological factors, with spatial literacy forming the largest of all gender differences (Reilly, Neumanna, Andrews, 2016). However, it is also well documented that all students — regardless of gender — can be trained to improve spatial reasoning (Uttal, 2013).
At the recent National Education Summit in September, I presented on ambitious ways schools can integrate digital and design technologies to improve spatial literacy, discussing a blueprint curriculum that examines how spatial literacies can be enhanced through school-wide pedagogy advances. The core focus of the blueprint investigates smarter ways schools can link spatial literacy with the academic disciplines of mathematics and technologies. In doing so, I envisage a stronger correlation between spatial ability and success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses.