The effect of instruction of visual/spatial thinking skills on learning physics concepts

Abstract

Students with weak visual/spatial thinking skills often perform poorly in mathematics and science. The high school juniors I teach who had low scores on a test of visual/spatial ability also had low scores on their physics assessments. The treatment in this action research project was to provide instruction in visual/spatial thinking by using a tangible object (in particular cardboard vectors) that the student could manipulate at first then guide the students to use their "mind's eye" to manipulate the images without the manipulatives. A large majority of the students have shown significant improvement in both their visual/spatial skills and their understanding of basic physics.