Lost in Space: Need for Spatial/Geographic Research and Research Application in Elementary Education

Space in school learning is the microspace of desktops and the paper tasks on them, as well as the macrospaces that form concentrically around students -- classroom-school, neighborhood-community, state, nation, world. The curriculum references the latter, at least as regards cartographic knowledge and skills. The current California State standards insist that students begin geography-referenced learning from kindergarten onwards. However, despite employing promising language, like "spatial thinking," the standards actually focus only on a limited repertoire of map skills. In fact, first grade students are introduced to manipulations and problem solving with its abstract representations as shapes and symbols on paper before they have much opportunity to experience, let alone investigate the geography itself.

Spatial learning in the microspace of paper (or chalkboard) representation is fundamental to all other learning that occurs -- or fails to occur. This learning traditionally prepares students for performing and receiving instruction at the level of symbolic representation. Although teaching in primary grades strongly targets concept learning, overt reference to spatial concepts and skills is largely ended by first grade. However, learning to read, write, and spell requires coding information about the orientation of oneself with respect to symbols and symbol systems that are the common tools of academic learning. Letters of the alphabet, for example, appear in different spatial planes and at different scales -- chalkboard, paper, book. Copying the lower-case b, d, g, p, from chalkboard to paper, therefore, can be problematic for children in primary grades. They must learn a kind of small-scale navigation -- self-regulated as well as in response to teachers' directions. Following directions while learning basic skills means locating and relocating and remembering how to locate.  Finding one's way through book pages and work papers and information resources on walls requires acquisition of schemas that code objects in physical as well as conceptual spaces.

Students who write English words from right to left, often with letters in mirror-image orientation, or write "pet" for "bet," or who lose their place while reading, are likely to be disoriented in space, not necessarily in visual acuity or knowledge of phonics. For several decades, teachers have infused the mathematics curriculum with tasks requiring manipulation of material objects either as foundation or enrichment. However, the spatial character of simple arithmetic eludes many children. In multidigit multiplication, for example, students must retrieve simple multiplication, remember place value rules, and remember the actual "places" where these rules apply.

Most children make spatial errors in writing, reading, and arithmetic initially but quickly learn and become reliably correct.  Between 7 and 10, most have also learned the navigation systems required for receiving instruction in all classroom, book, and desktop learning tasks. About 8% of all children do not. Another 7% may have life-long difficulties remembering position, coordinating physical responses, sequencing, "reading" symbolic representations in their proper spatial orientations.  These persistent difficulties might be trivial were it not for the fact that their presence almost inevitably correlates with substantial deficiency in basic skills as well as the content knowledge and skills, including geography, that require fluency and reliability of elementary skills. The fact is, even research that focuses exclusively on these children and their learning difficulties is poorly informed by contemporary research on spatial cognition and geographic thinking.  Also, though, researchers who work at the interface of geography and spatial cognition are generally disinterested in applying their research to learning problems of atypically developing children -- with perhaps the one striking exception being children who are visually impaired.

The truth is that very little research on spatial learning or spatial cognition finds its way into the public schools either as an influence on new methods of instruction or on curriculum content. This is an unfortunate loss of opportunity for all students, one that makes bringing new undergraduates from map-reading to GIS a little more laborious. For perhaps 15% of elementary school students, though, the absence of spatial-geographic research applications in teacher training and school curriculum is not merely a matter of lost opportunity. For these children, failure to bridge between research and practice may have far more serious and long-term consequences.