ABSTRACT

While the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) has made important inroads in addressing the importance of spatial thinking skills in geography, organizations representative of mathematics and science have either done so tangentially or have not clearly articulated the topic. The word polysemy, meaning literally many signs, is a term not often used in everyday discourse. But it makes a great deal of sense when it applies to the terms space and spatial. Professor of architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Leon van Schaik presents the argument that spatial intelligence is a human ability that needs to be made deliberate in the mind. The Johns Hopkins University Center on Talented Youth defines spatial ability as follows: Spatial ability is the capacity to understand and remember the spatial relations among objects. Nora Newcomben defines spatial thinking thus. Spatial thinking concerns the locations of objects, their shapes, their relations to each other, and the paths they take as they move.