Spatial thinking has been recognized as a multifaceted ability at the forefront of human intelligence. This ability is also a key competency for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) domains, since spatial skills play an important role in the development of STEM expertise.
Scale is a crucial parameter in defining space and in studying the relation between STEM learning and spatial skills. Spatial thinking is a multi-dimensional ability comprising different cognitive mechanisms for manipulating objects (small-scale spatial skills) or interacting with the environment (large-scale spatial skills). Small-scale spatial skills like mental rotation, spatial visualization, spatial orientation, and spatial scanning are assessed using traditional psychometric tests. They have been studied extensively in relation to various domains such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics and are considered predictive of both interest and success in STEM disciplines. Large-scale or environmental spatial skills are also important in many STEM domains and involve spatial reasoning and solving spatial problems occurring in the environment. Typical tasks that are used to assess large-scale spatial skills are: scene and landmark recognition from a learned environment, distance and direction estimations, drawing a sketch map of the environment, giving and interpreting directions and pointing to local and distant locations.
