TeachSpatial

Posted Sat, 10/30/2010 - 9:26pm by karlg
Grant Number: 
1043777
Target Audiences: 
Undergraduate and 9-12 instructors in STEM fields; educators with an interest in standards; scientists in the field of spatial cognition

TeachSpatial is a new small-grant NSDL Pathways project to extend and enhance an existing web portal (http://teachspatial.org) by providing guided access to digital resources that support instruction in spatial thinking skills within STEM subject courses. We get under way in January, 2011. Spatial thinking has been defined as “a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning...[that] can be learned and taught formally to students using appropriately designed tools, technologies, and curricula.”

Instructors in numerous STEM fields have developed relevant digital teaching resources (course syllabi and units; exercises and linked datasets; examples and applications; rubrics for assessment) and many of these are registered in NSDL, but we lack the means to locate them in this broader multidisciplinary context. The TeachSpatial project will develop proposed spatial learning objectives for science instruction in grades 9–12, and for a college freshman seminar in spatial studies. It will then develop a research-based lexical framework mapping those objectives to a classification schema for fundamental spatial concepts already in development. The TeachSpatial portal will be extended as a NSDL Collection, organized around that framework, providing highly usable web access and feedback mechanisms.