USING AN AGGREGATE SKILL TEST TO ASSESS SPATIAL THINKING IN UNDERGRADUATE GEOLOGY COURSES

Academic and industry geoscientists have noted that spatial thinking is an essential competency to fully comprehend and apply many geoscience concepts. We sought to establish a baseline of information on the development of spatial thinking skills as part of a larger, convergent mixed methods study to examine how spatial thinking skills are represented, developed, and perceived throughout an undergraduate geology curriculum. We administered a pre/post spatial thinking aggregate skill test in required undergraduate geology courses. The aggregate test measured students’ performance of seven distinct spatial skills (disembedding, transformations between 2D/3D, penetrative thinking, scaling, space as proxy for time, perspective taking, and updating movement) that can be divided among four dimensions of spatial thinking (intrinsic static, intrinsic dynamic, extrinsic static, extrinsic dynamic). We will discuss the results from a selection of courses serving students at different stages of their academic journey. We will examine both the changes to students’ spatial thinking changes during a semester-long course and the differences between students’ skills at different academic levels. We will also compare these data to the results from the course observation strand of our project, which showed how specific spatial thinking skills were incorporated into the different courses. As part of the larger project, these results will be compared with student and instructor interviews. While this study initially aims to describe spatial thinking of an undergraduate geology curriculum at one university, the results have the potential transfer to other undergraduate-serving universities where similar courses are taught. Additionally, the study design used may be useful as a potential tool for future studies on skill development in the geosciences or in other fields.