Visual-Spatial Thinking: An Aspect of Science Overlooked by Educators

Thinking with images plays a central role in scientific creativity and communication but is neglected in science classrooms. This article reviews the fundamental role of imagery in science an technology and our current knowledge of visual-spatial cognition. A novel analogic and thematic organization of images and visualization within science and technology is proposed that can help in the generation and evaluation of classroom activities and materials, and serve as a focus for professional development programs in visual-spatial thinking for science teachers. Visual-spatial thinking includes vision - using the eyes to identify, locate, and think about objects and ourselves in the world, and imagery - the formation, inspection, transformation, and maintenace of images in the "mind's eye" in the absence of an visaul stimulus. A spatial image preserves relationships among a complex set of ideas as a signle chunk in working memory, increasing the amount of information that can be maintained in consciousness at a given moment. Vision and imagery are fundamental cognitive processes using specialized pathways in the brain and rely on our memory of prior experience. Visual-spatial thinking develops from birth, together with language and other specialized abilities, through interactions between inherited capabilities and experience. Scientific creativy can be considered as an amalgam of three closely allied mental formats: images; metaphores; and unifying ideas (themes). Combinations of images, analogies, and themes pervade science in the form of "master images" and visualization techniques. A critique of current practise in education contrasts the subservient role of visual-spatial learning with the dominance of the alphanumeric encoding skills in classrooms and textbooks. The lack of coherence in curriculum, pedagogy, and learning theory reauires reform that adresses thinking skills, including imagery. Sucessful integration of information, skills and attitudes into cohesive mental schemata employed by self-aware human beings is a basic goal of education. The current attempt to impose integration using themes is criticized on the grounds that the required underpinning in cognitive skills and content knowledge by teachers and students may be absent. Teaching strategies that employ visual-spatial thinking are reviewed. Master images are recommended as a novel point of departure for a systematic development of programs on visual-spatial thinking in research, teacher e