Teachers' Spatial Skills across Disciplines and Education Levels: Exploring Nationally Representative Data

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Integrative Statement

Spatial skills are strongly correlated with achievement in STEM fields, even after accounting for the effects of other cognitive skills. This finding has led to substantial efforts to improve spatial skills, in the hope of improving STEM achievement or preventing dropout from STEM fields.

Thus far, almost all of the research on the relation between spatial skills and STEM outcomes has focused on students. Here we argue that it may be equally important to also consider the spatial skills of teachers. In other domains, researchers have found that teachers’ skills influences student learning. If teachers find spatial skills challenging, then they may have difficulty teaching spatial topics or judging the quality of students’ work. Conversely, teachers with high levels of spatial skills may be particularly attracted to or excel in the teaching of STEM topics. Thus, it is important to determine whether spatial skills are related to the topics and levels (e.g. preschool versus high school) that teachers teach.

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). Teachers were grouped into three categories: preschool/primary (n=2032), secondary non-STEM (n=1455), and secondary STEM (n=941). Secondary non-STEM teachers included teachers who taught the following subjects: commercial education, English, foreign language, home economics, physical education, and social studies. Secondary STEM teachers included teachers who taught mathematics, science, and trade/industrial/vocational education.

Multiple regression analyses were used to compare spatial skills across teacher types (preschool/primary vs. secondary non-STEM vs. secondary STM) after controlling for covariates such as math and verbal skills. Results showed that secondary STEM teachers had stronger spatial skills than secondary non-STEM teachers (by 0.5 standard deviations) and preschool and primary teachers (by 0.8 standard deviations). In contrast, preschool teachers had the lowest spatial skills, which were not significantly different from the population mean (p = 0.54). Moreover, both college-educated preschool/primary (M = -0.55) and secondary non-STEM teachers (M = -0.32) had lower spatial skills than the college graduate population mean (p < .001). These differences remained significant even after accounting for differences in general intelligence and gender distributions.

Our results indicate that spatial skills predict both what topics teachers will teach and at what level. Preschool teachers consistently had lower level of spatial skills than teachers at other levels, and high-school STEM teachers consistently had higher levels. These results suggest that it may be important to both highlight the importance of spatial thinking and to work to improve spatial skills in both pre- and in-service teachers.

Authors

• Kinnari Atit, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Miller, American Institutes for Research
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nora S. Newcombe, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David H Uttal, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author