Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing focus on spatial technologies in teaching and learning, revealing the potential to support new forms of youth sensemaking across varied settings and modalities. Recent scholarship has shown the possibilities of participatory digital mapping technologies, enabling young people to collect data…

Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial…

Problem solving is a highly valued skill in chemistry. Courses within this discipline place a substantial emphasis on problem-solving performance and tend to weigh such performance heavily in assessments of learning. Researchers have dedicated considerable effort investigating individual factors that influence problem-solving performance. The…

This study describes how a group of grade 7 and 8 students in South Africa engaged with the notion of spatial scale in the Universe before, during and after a visit to an astronomy science centre. A limited amount of research has been conducted on this concept worldwide. Using a combination of concept maps, observations and interviews, results…