Primary school science has had a tough few years. Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman has admitted that “schools’ understandable desire to ace the English and maths Sats has been squeezing the science curriculum out”. Meanwhile, funding pressures mean that schools don’t often have the equipment to successfully teach the subject. And then there is the fact that any science graduates tempted into teaching tend to favour secondary school positions.

It’s little surprise, then, that just 23 per cent of 10- and 11-year-olds reached the expected standard in science, according to 2017 government figures.

Turning this around is no small task, but Professor Emily Farran has a good idea of how it might be done: by placing better emphasis on spatial skills in primary schools.

The developmental psychology section lead at the University of Surrey researches the link between spatial ability - ie, perceiving the location and dimension of objects and their relationships to one another, and to us - and science, technology and engineering success. The idea that we need to nurture spatial ability is, she says, a no-brainer.

“Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion of literature regarding spatial thinking to support Stem. An important piece of evidence came from Jonathan Wai and colleagues in 2009 [1], who demonstrated that those with greater spatial ability in childhood were more likely to enter Stem professions as adults.

“If we provide children with the skills to interpret a diagram in their science lessons, the ability to understand the scale of visual representations of cells, or the solar system, this could have both immediate and long-term positive effects on their scientific skills,” she says.

Spatial awareness

Earlier this year, Farran and her PhD student Alex Hodgkiss published a study on spatial cognition and science learning in primary school children [2]. They recruited 123 students aged 7 to 11 from a London primary school to complete five spatial tasks, alongside science assessments incorporating the domains of chemistry, biology and physics.

The spatial tasks were either intrinsic (the spatial relationship between things within an object) or extrinsic (the relationship between different objects). Those types were then further split into dynamic and static spatial ability: dynamic abilities include objects moving or transforming; static abilities process non-moving objects.

The findings? “Mental folding” (an intrinsic-dynamic spatial skill) and “spatial scaling” (an extrinsic-static spatial skill) were the strongest predictors for overall science success, accounting for 8 per cent of the variance in science scores.

What is mental folding? Children were shown a picture of a shape and asked to imagine folding along a dotted line. From a choice of four other shapes, they then selected which one it would look like after the fold.

And spatial scaling? Children had to find equivalent corresponding locations on two maps, when one was varied in size relative to the other.

Looking at the results by scientific discipline, ability in mental folding predicted both physics and biology scores.

So what can these results tell us about science learning in the classroom?

“In order to mentally fold a piece of paper, you have to be good at visualisation. That’s really useful in science. If you can manipulate things in your head, it can help you with problem-solving. If you can visualise the transfer of energy when you’re heating up a saucepan, or why two magnets attract each other, it helps you to do the investigative side of science,” says Farran.

Interestingly, biology - an area thought to be relatively less spatially demanding than, say, physics - was the discipline most strongly associated with spatial skills, and this is the first study to date that has linked a child’s mental folding ability to biology.

“It might be that biology lends itself well to visualisation. In the example in the paper, we explain that when learning about the function of plant roots, children may recall a spatial mental model of a plant,” Farran explains.

Spatial scaling also emerged as a predictor of total scores, biology scores and chemistry scores. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to link extrinsic-static spatial skills (measured by the spatial scaling task here) with science achievement. Understanding relative magnitude and scale is essential for the subject,” she adds.

“Children must learn to appreciate how systems and processes vary in size - for instance, a cell versus an organism. Children also need to move back and forth between representational models of different scales; for example, for biology, a diagrammatic representation and a life-sized human skeleton model.”

Farran believes that there is room in the curriculum for spatial ability to be actively taught, and it’s about going back to basics.

“Teachers need to teach children how to read a diagram, for example, helping children to understand the relationships between an X and a Y axis, and what the data represents. That there are good and bad diagrams. A clear example is how oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are denoted as red and blue in diagrams. This helps children to understand the flow of blood around the body and the processes involved,” she says.

“Another way of improving the spatial aspects of diagrams is to spatially align like with like when comparing one diagram to another (eg, animal versus plant cells) so that the similarities and differences can be easily noticed.”

Meanwhile, teachers can also tap into spatial language - and this is something that her University of Surrey colleagues are currently studying. “There’s hardly any research into spatial language in primary school children, but there is research demonstrating that toddlers who hear more spatial language have stronger spatial skills once they start school. It’s about using words like ‘on’, ‘in’, ‘up’, ‘down’, and using opposing terms like ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘left’ and ‘right’. Spatial language has a strong capacity to enhance spatial understanding. For example, words like ‘parallel’ succinctly communicate otherwise difficult spatial concepts,” Farran explains.

Visualisation is also key. “Teachers can ask their students to visualise a process in their heads. Imagine the trajectory of a ball as it’s thrown. Imagine the flow of blood through the heart. You can also get children to demonstrate this by asking them to do sketches. These can be useful because they help a child to understand a concept that they’ve been taught - it is a spatial form of active learning,” she adds.

So is saving primary science just about better teaching of basic spatial skills? No, says Farran: inhibition is another area that could give students a step up in science, and that’s something she and colleagues are investigating in their UnLocke Project. This is led by Professor Denis Mareschal at Birkbeck, University of London, and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Adult data [3] has shown that inhibition - stopping to think before giving an answer - is crucial to science learning.

“Science is full of misconceptions. Children may have the misconception that the Earth is flat. They are taught that it’s round. So they have two potential answers in their head, the intuitive one which is incorrect and an analytic answer, developed through knowledge that’s been taught. It was always assumed that once you got new knowledge, it overwrote your previous, incorrect knowledge. But it doesn’t. As time goes on, the correct answer will become stronger, but as you’re learning, you need to inhibit the intuitive answer, which is often a misconception,” says Farran.

For the project, Farran and colleagues combed through the Years 3 and 5 curricula for science and maths objectives and devised an intervention that trains children to engage their knowledge-based analytic system and to inhibit their misconceptions.

The intervention is a computer-based game show in which a character poses questions to virtual contestants, who demonstrate correct and incorrect thinking. Children complete tasks as if they’re taking part in the game show. Some 6,500 children across 84 UK schools participated over a 10-week period. Children took part in the “stop and think” intervention in science and maths lessons and there was also a control group in which children were given a social skills intervention that drew on the PSHE curriculum.

“We’ve measured the children’s maths and science abilities after the training to see if it differs from control children,” says Farran. “The intervention is embedded into the age-appropriate curriculum, with the idea that with practice in stopping and thinking, they will get better at inhibiting their intuitive and incorrect misconceptions in favour of the correct, often counter-intuitive, answer. A lot of the time it’s not that children don’t know the answer, but they are too quick to answer.”

As part of the study, 50 children completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) testing session before and after intervention to investigate changes in neural activity. “It’s based on adult data [4], which shows that the more expert you are, the more you’re able to inhibit the intuitive system. This can be shown as a change in neural activation, using fMRI,” Farran says.

Indeed, the research involving adults shows that brain activation switches from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex -which controls our thoughts and behaviour - when we’re switching from our “intuitive” brain to our more analytic brain.

The results will be published next year. And, alongside spatial ability, Farran is hoping this will provide some useful pointers for primary science teachers.

“We’re predicting that those who took part in the stop and think intervention will have stronger science and maths skills after the intervention than those in the control group,” she says. “These two aspects of research, training children to inhibit, and training children to think spatially, are complementary and have the potential to support science learning.”

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

Meet the academic

Professor Emily Farran spent 10 years at UCL Institute of Education, where she was professor of cognitive development, before moving to the University of Surrey earlier this year. She is an associate member of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, which aims to further translational research across neuroscience, psychology and education. She is also director of CoGDeV (Cognition, Genes and Developmental Variability) Lab, a group of researchers investigating cognitive development in typical and neurodevelopmental disordered groups. Their most recent work is around the relationship between spatial thinking and Stem in primary school children.

References and further reading

[1] Wai, J, Lubinski, D, and Benbow, CP (2009). “Spatial ability for Stem domains: aligning over 50 years of cumulative psychological knowledge solidifies its importance”. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101 (4), 817-835.

[2] Hodgkiss, A, Gilligan, KA, Tolmie, AK, Thomas, MSC, Farran, EK (2018). “Spatial cognition and science achievement: the contribution of intrinsic and extrinsic spatial skills from 7-11 years.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 675-697. bit.ly/SpatialCog

[3] Masson, S, Potvin, P, Riopel, M, and Foisy, L-MB. (2014). “Differences in brain activation between novices and experts in science during a task involving a common misconception in electricity”. Mind, Brain, and Education, 8, 44-55.

[4] Houdé, O, et al (2000). “Shifting from the perceptual brain to the logical brain: the neural impact of cognitive inhibition training.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12 (5), 721-728.

Further reading

* Cognition, Genes and Developmental Variability Lab website, bit.ly/CoGDev

* Newcombe, NS (2016). “Thinking spatially in the classroom.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 10, 1-6.