UC Riverside

Spatial skills, the set of cognitive skills that are responsible for our understanding of objects in real and imagined spaces, have been identified as a potential gate-keeper for STEM success. Because of the recent emphasis on improving education to prepare for the increasing demand for workers in STEM fields, there is a rising interest in bolstering students’ spatial skills to address this challenge. Given the evidence that teachers’ skills and attitudes toward a domain can affect their pedagogical practice within that domain and in turn affect their students’ learning and achievement, some researchers have focused their attention on understanding how to best support teachers. This study seeks to understand how specifically elementary school teachers’ spatial cognition and spatial affect impact their preference for implementing pedagogical devices that would promote the development of their students’ spatial thinking skills. It is imperative to study this particular sample of teachers because of the well-established presence of spatial reasoning in childhood and in the elementary school curriculum. Eighty elementary school teachers completed measures of spatial skills, spatial anxiety, spatial habits of mind, preferences for spatial pedagogy, general anxiety, and general reasoning. Results indicate that elementary school teachers' spatial skills were negatively associated with their spatial anxiety, and teachers who display higher levels of spatial skills reported greater preferences for using spatial pedagogy in hypothetical teaching situations. These findings have implications for teacher professional development related to supporting students’ spatial skills during science and math instruction in elementary school.