Teachers’ Spatial Skills Across Disciplines and Education Levels: Exploring Nationally Representative Data

Abstract

Efforts to improve U.S. students’ educational outcomes have often focused on improving their engagement, performance, and retention in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Spatial skills, which enable us to visualize and manipulate objects in real and imagined spaces, are important for student learning in STEM. Additionally, student learning may depend on teachers’ skills and attitudes. This study used nationally representative data to examine the spatial skills of high school students who later became precollege teachers. Results showed that secondary STEM teachers had substantially stronger spatial skills than secondary non-STEM teachers and preschool/primary teachers. Compared to the general population, 79% of secondary STEM teachers had above average spatial skills versus 61% of secondary non-STEM teachers and 47% of preschool/primary teachers. The weaker spatial skills of preschool and primary teachers are concerning because spatial skills are key to STEM learning beginning at early ages. These results suggest future research is needed to investigate how teachers’ spatial skills influence student learning. S C I E N T I F I C A B S T R A C T Teachers’ skills and attitudes in a specific domain can influence students’ learning in that domain. Here we focused on spatial skills, which are important for learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Fostering students’ spatial skills may rely on teachers’ comfort in implementing spatially demanding activities in the classroom. This study used nationally representative data from Project TALENT to examine the spatial skills of high school students who later became preschool to high school teachers (n 4,428 teachers). Results showed that secondary STEM teachers had This article was published November 8, 2018. Kinnari Atit and David I. Miller, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University; Nora S. Newcombe, Department of Psychology, Temple University; David H. Uttal, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University. This article is part of the special section “Educational Psychology.” The guest editor for this section is Melody Wiseheart. Researchers interested in reproducing or extending this analyses should contact the American Institutes of Research directly to obtain the Project TALENT dataset (see https://www.projecttalent.org/contact/). Copyright of this manuscript belongs to the author(s). The author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish this manuscript first, identify itself as the original publisher, and claim all commercial exploitation rights. Upon publication, the manuscript is available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Please use APA’s Online Permissions Process (Rightslink®) at http://www.apa.org/about/contact/copyright/seek-permission.aspx to request commercial reuse of this content. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kinnari Atit, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, or to David H. Uttal, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: kinnari.atit@northwestern.edu or duttal@northwestern.edu Archives of Scientific Psychology 2018, 6, 130–137 © 2018 The Author(s) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/arc0000041 2169-3269 Archives of Scientific Psychology www.apa.org/pubs/journals/arc stronger spatial skills than secondary non-STEM teachers (by 0.5 standard deviations) and preschool and primary teachers (by 0.8 standard deviations). These differences remained substantial even after accounting for differences in general intelligence and gender distributions. These results suggest the need for research on how teachers’ spatial skills impact students’ spatial skills and STEM learning.