Spatial thinking has received increased attention in the past several years. One reason is the National Research Council’s report, Learning To Think Spatially-The Incorporation of GIS Across the K-12 Curriculum served to help more people consider ‘graphicacy” to be equally important as teaching about numeracy and literacy. Those who have been teaching with GIS for the past few decades have long been advocating spatial thinking as the foundation for success in problem-solving with GIS. Further back in time, geographers and geography teachers have been promoting spatial thinking for centuries. Many welcome this new attention on spatial thinking and are hopeful for the future. Without spatial thinking, a person can be proficient in working with GIS software tools, but that person will likely have difficulty in thinking outside the software box, considering problems holistically, and examining problems from a spatial perspective, whether they use GIS or other tools.
There are many ways to conceptualize spatial thinking. The National Research Council stated that to think spatially entails knowing about:
(1) Space-Different ways of calculating distance, coordinate systems, the nature of spaces in two and three dimensions. Space can be thought about as absolute location-such as latitude/longitude, UTM, or the British National Grid. Space also includes relative location, the concepts of adjacency, intersections, and regions.
(2) Representation-including the relationship among views, orthogonal versus perspective maps, the effect of map projections, and the how features can be displayed cartographically as images, points, lines, and polygons.
(3) Reasoning-including different ways of thinking about distances (great circle routes versus straight-line mapped routes, for example), the ability to extrapolate and interpolate, projecting a relationship on a graph into the future, estimating the slope of a hillside from a contour map, selecting a detour, and so on.
This is just one way of conceptualizing spatial thinking. Keep reading this blog as we illustrate other ways.
- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
