Visual Spatial Reasearch

Cultural Differences/Gender Differences

Peggy Blackwell summarizes gender differences as follows: Women, as a consequence of socialization or genetics or both, have difficulty perceiving relationships in and among three-dimensional objects. For example, some women find it difficult to drive a car in reverse, or to determine how a mechanical object works simply by looking at it. Many women do not automatically learn, at home or at school, the total concept of space, which includes direction, distance, perspective, movement, and relationships of objects to each other in space. Women have consistently shown a sex differentiated lack of what is called spatial visualization and spatial orientation.

Barbara Moses found that the ability to think visually is not innate and can be improved. She found a strong positive relationship between problem-solving and visual/spatial thinking skills. She also found the greatest improvement among female students who had few previous direct experiences with visual thinking.

Smith and Schroeder found that fourth graders who received training in visual thinking outperformed those who did not and there was no difference between the sexes in how training affected their abilities to perform visual/spatial tasks.

Herbert Cohen used SCIIS materials with fifth grade students and found both males and females significantly improved in logical and visual thinking abilities.

Smith and Litman compared training of fourth graders with training of adolescents and concluded that both can benefit from instruction at the fourth grade level; but if instruction is postponed to early adolescence, only boys benefit.

Pallarand and Seeber found that community college students significantly increased their visual thinking abilities after instruction that was based in large part on the SCIS fourth grade unit "Relative Position and Motion".

Lord found that regular experiences with spatial tasks significantly improved visual and spatial thinking of college biology students.

Siegel and Schadler, found that that boys were more accurate in constructing scale models of their classroom than girls. Herman and Siegel found that boys outperformed girls in a task of reconstructing a model of a large scale model town that they had explored.

Summary

These differences might be explained by the differences in toys that boys and girls play with, differences in parental responses to girls and boys manipulation of toys, differences in amount of space boys and girls are allowed to explore and play, amount of time spent outdoors, and distances allowed to roam from home.

Research supports three ideas:

1. Boys tend to outperform girls on visual/spatial tasks;
2. Visual/spatial abilities can be improved through instruction; and
3. Both sexes benefit from planned visual and spatial exercises, but girls profit most if a narrowing of a gender gap in visual/spatial thinking is achieved.

School more than any other institution is responsible for the down grading of visual thinking. Most educators are not only disinterested in visual thinking, they are hostile toward it and regard it as childish, primitive, and prelogical. They emphasize information stored in proper categories with little thought to connecting it with the real world.

Dr. Robert Sweetland's Notes ©