Adopt in-school spatial education curricula and assess their transferability using neural change alongside traditional assessments¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 6 claims (6 for) · 1 study (1 causal), q2 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends wider in-school adoption of spatial education, noting that classroom-based evidence provides new empirical support where enthusiasm has not yet permeated education policy and practice. It further proposes neurally informed curriculum assessment: leveraging neural changes that predict transferability to evaluate curricula on relatively small scales — identifying existing curricula likely to achieve transfer, identifying changes that can improve transfer, and informing development of novel transferable curricula — while assessing curricula rather than individual students to avoid the practical and ethical limitations of large-scale neuroimaging.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Longitudinal fMRI measurement at more than one time point paired with the curriculum
• propensity scoring–based matching or comparable designs to minimize selection bias in real-world classrooms

Constraints¶

• Neural change should bolster, not replace, traditional assessments; how broad or specific neural-change-based prediction is remains to be determined by testing wider arrays of transfer tasks

Target Learners¶

• high school students in STEM courses

Target Learning Goals¶

• transferable reasoning abilities
• spatial thinking

Affordances¶

• Mental Model Theory Spatial Basis Verbal Reasoning

Claims¶

• Curriculum-related neural changes during spatial scanning predict and mediate transfer to verbal reasoning [+M]
• Neural change during spatial scanning predicts verbal reasoning transfer better than traditional performance-based assessments, and best prediction combines both [+M]
• The spatial curriculum produced near transfer to improved spatial scanning and increased self-reported spatial habits of mind, but not to mental rotation [+M]
• The spatial curriculum produced longitudinal neural changes during reasoning: increased aIPS activity, increased SpatialMap-to-DLPFC connectivity, and increased nonspatial-to-spatial representational similarity [+M]
• A spatial STEM curriculum yields far transfer to improved verbal deductive reasoning in high school students, including on nonspatial relation trials [+M]
• Improvement in spatial scanning predicts and mediates the curriculum's transfer effect to verbal reasoning [+M]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Cortes, R. A., Peterson, E. G., Kraemer, D. J. M., Kolvoord, R. A., Uttal, D. H., Dinh, N., Weinberger, A. B., Daker, R. J., Lyons, I. M., Goldman, D., & Green, A. E. (2022). Transfer from spatial education to verbal reasoning and prediction of transfer from learning-related neural change. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo3555