There is a group of children that is being missed by the education system, despite academics having consistently highlighted that this is the case. These students have a particular talent for spatial reasoning - an ability to manipulate images and pictures mentally. But, owing to a lack of testing for this metric, their ability is never truly recognised, despite its being found to correlate with a number of positive outcomes in education, most notably in maths.

So why are we so reluctant to recognise spatial abilities and how can we change this? To find answers, Tes caught up with two academics who are leading the way in this field: Jonathan Wai and Joni Lakin.

Tes: Spatial ability seems to have been touted as important for some years now - we have covered it a lot in Tes - yet policymakers don’t appear to be listening…

JL and JW: Yes, and it is not because of a lack of evidence. Over half a century of research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology has shown that spatial reasoning - the ability to “generate, retain, retrieve and transform well-structured visual images” - is useful in predicting performance in many Stem, visual arts and other “hands on” professions. Moreover, spatial reasoning matters over and above mathematical and verbal reasoning, which are the capacities most commonly measured on standardised tests and developed in schools.

What impact does this failure to recognise spatial abilities have?

Some of our recent research published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology looking at the past 60 years suggests more than 2 million spatially talented kids may be neglected in US schools. That level of neglect is likely replicated in schools worldwide.

Is the issue that we don’t know how to measure spatial abilities accurately?

Not at all. Spatial ability measures have existed about as long as we’ve been studying human abilities and intelligence. The US Army Beta, the nonverbal test for illiterate or non-native English speakers in the First World War, included some tasks that are classified as spatial tests now. Today, spatial ability tests are part of individually administered intelligence tests (such as the Woodcock-Johnson), which have to be administered by trained examiners and interpreted by those with PhD-level training. We also see spatial tasks on the US Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and other tests designed to place adults into different career and training programmes.

In education, the challenge is that because spatial abilities are not part of accountability metrics, there’s little incentive for testing companies to invest in these measures.

Have any tests been developed for school-age children?

In the US, we don’t see good measures of spatial ability designed for school-age students that can be easily administered and have the kinds of normative-scale information that we expect from ability tests. In the UK, the Cognitive Abilities Test has added a spatial battery to its assessment and the US counterpart of that test (CogAT) will soon add a spatial battery as well. These measures will address the need for easily administered, high-quality spatial tests.

Beyond these, what exists for school-age students are freely available tests designed for research, like the Purdue Visualisation of Rotation Test. A research group in Australia has also published the Spatial Reasoning Instrument. These are relatively strong tests, but to make spatial ability part of school accountability and planning instruction you need national norms and the validity evidence to support their use in the classroom.

Why do you think policymakers have been so resistant to build and prioritise spatial tests?

Education policymakers and practitioners logically use what is available to them and also respond to the incentives that they currently face. The vast majority of tests used in academic services simply don’t include spatial measures, at least in the US, where mathematical and verbal reasoning has always been the focus for numerous policies.

Your belief is that this failure is mainly affecting already disadvantaged students?

Yes, some prior work of ours showed that spatially talented kids are often academically inconvenienced in schools - for example, they exhibit more behavioural issues and challenges. Our most recent paper, published in Contemporary Educational Psychology, further illustrates that spatial reasoning ability can be fruitfully used to “find the missing Einsteins” - those students with talent in spatial strengths, but who are so often overlooked in school systems.

A lot of discussion has been around how to improve the representation of talented students from marginalised backgrounds but, perhaps because of the strong focus on maths and verbal reasoning capacities, there has been little-to-no research investigating the extent to which spatial reasoning measures would help identify disadvantaged talent.

But you are changing that, by looking at this in your new paper…

Yes, we found that if your goal is to increase the representation of key groups in gifted education - such as students with low socioeconomic status (SES), students in rural areas and Black or Latinx students - then spatial ability, leadership skills and conscientiousness could also be valuable assessments to consider.

Across the different datasets we worked with, by using measures of two-dimensional visualisation (a subcomponent of spatial ability), you would see higher representation of low SES, rural, Black and Latinx students [in groups identified as “gifted”] compared with looking at reading or maths achievement scores. These measures also identified more of these students than a measure of abstract reasoning, which is commonly used in gifted identification.

It was also encouraging that these measures also predicted later reading and math achievement: 2D visualisation and leadership [measurements] predicted these outcomes at least as well as abstract reasoning.

Do you think we will see change if we get more and more studies like this?

Well, the evidence base surrounding the importance of broadening tests to include spatial reasoning measures is already solid and can form the basis for policies for identifying talented kids with spatial reasoning strengths, and finding ways to adjust curricula to help students with this pattern of strengths. If policymakers are interested in using evidence to tap a huge, neglected pool of kids who also deserve to have their spatial talents developed, we think this is a logical next step.

Joni Lakin is associate professor of educational studies at the University of Alabama. Jonathan Wai is assistant professor of education policy and psychology at the University of Arkansas

This article originally appeared in the 6 November 2020 issue under the headline “How I…used spatial ability testing to find the ‘missing Einsteins’”

Joni Lakin and Jonathan Wai will be amongst the speakers at the 2022 World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. For more information or to book tickets, visit worldedsummit.com