The geosciences consist of multiple disciplines including geology, oceanography, and atmospheric science. Significant work expended to understand spatial thinking skills important to teaching and learning geology has advanced our ability to support students in geology courses and to achieve increased student success, retention, and diversity in…

A survey with nine meteorological charts, maps, and images from a 2015 significant weather event was administered to meteorologists (N = 93) to identify which spatial thinking skills they report using with each chart, map, and image. Results reveal high reported use of mental animation (74.6%), disembedding (72.4%), and perspective taking (71.6%)…

Cognitive science research shows that the brain has two systems for processing visual information, one specialized for spatial information such as position, orientation, and trajectory, and the other specialized for information used to identify objects, such as color, shape and texture. Some individuals seem to be more facile with the spatial…