Department of Educational Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.
Br J Educ Psychol. 2017 Dec;87(4):683-699. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12172. Epub 2017 Aug 31.
Spatial skills have been linked to better performance in mathematics.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher spatial skills and their instruction, including teacher content and pedagogical knowledge, use of pictorial representations, and use of gestures during geometry instruction.
Fifty-six middle school teachers participated in the study.
The teachers were administered spatial measures of mental rotations and spatial visualization. Next, a single geometry class was videotaped.
Correlational analyses revealed that spatial skills significantly correlate with teacher's use of representational gestures and content and pedagogical knowledge during instruction of geometry. Spatial skills did not independently correlate with the use of pointing gestures or the use of pictorial representations. However, an interaction term between spatial skills and content and pedagogical knowledge did correlate significantly with the use of pictorial representations. Teacher experience as measured by the number of years of teaching and highest degree did not appear to affect the relationships among the variables with the exception of the relationship between spatial skills and teacher content and pedagogical knowledge.
Teachers with better spatial skills are also likely to use representational gestures and to show better content and pedagogical knowledge during instruction. Spatial skills predict pictorial representation use only as a function of content and pedagogical knowledge.
空间技能与更好的数学表现相关。
本研究旨在探讨教师空间技能与其教学之间的关系，包括教师的内容和教学知识、在几何教学中使用图像表示以及使用手势。
56 名中学教师参与了这项研究。
教师接受了心理旋转和空间可视化的空间能力测试。接下来，录制了一节单一的几何课。
相关分析显示，空间技能与教师在教授几何时使用表示性手势以及内容和教学知识显著相关。空间技能与指点手势或图像表示的使用不独立相关。然而，空间技能和内容与教学知识之间的交互项与图像表示的使用显著相关。教师的经验（以教学年限和最高学位来衡量）似乎并没有影响变量之间的关系，除了空间技能和教师内容与教学知识之间的关系。
空间技能更好的教师在教学中也更有可能使用表示性手势，并展示更好的内容和教学知识。空间技能仅在内容和教学知识的作用下预测图像表示的使用。
