Characterizing the Growth in Spatial Thinking Abilities in Undergraduate Meteorology Students Across the Curriculum

Spatial thinking skills, which are used to envision and find meaning in the shape, size, orientation, or relative positions of objects or phenomena in space, are essential to student success in many science disciplines, including atmospheric science. In particular, previous work on spatial thinking in the atmospheric sciences has demonstrated that skills such as mental animation, disembedding, and perspective taking are critical for properly interpreting, understanding, and predicting the four-dimensional atmosphere. However, when students develop and build on such skills as they progress through the undergraduate meteorology curriculum is unknown. In this study, the Spatial Thinking Abilities Test (STAT) was used to quantify the extent of spatial thinking abilities in undergraduate students enrolled in 10 courses required for the meteorology major at a large public university in the southeastern United States. Using a subset of 12 multiple choice questions, STAT was administered twice a semester in each course as a pre-test and post-test in Spring 2022, Fall 2022, and Spring 2023. Results demonstrated that students’ declared major strongly influenced STAT scores and thus spatial reasoning abilities; STEM majors consistently scored higher on the STAT than non-STEM majors, and meteorology majors scored higher than non-meteorology majors (including non-meteorology STEM majors). Additionally, males nearly always outperformed females, consistent with prior work on spatial thinking. To characterize the growth in spatial thinking skills, “pathways” students enrolled in sequential required courses were tracked throughout the study. While “novice” pathways students (i.e., freshmen/sophomores) exhibited minimal growth in spatial thinking, “intermediate” students (sophomores/juniors) demonstrated substantial improvements in spatial thinking abilities. The “advanced” (juniors/seniors) students showed modest growth. Thus, this suggests that pedagogical interventions seeking to build spatial reasoning skills may be particularly useful for novice students in meteorology.