Spatial Concept Perspectives

We have gathered ~300 excerpts from published works about fundamental spatial concept terms. These have been cross-referenced with the concept lexicon appearing on the left. Those terms were drawn from the U.S.National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996) for topic areas B - Physical Science, C - Life Science, D - Earth and Space Science, as well as from the 1994 U.S. Geography Teaching Standards for grades 9-12. Those standards can be browsed here.

spatial concept terms

disciplinary perspectives on "congruence"

congruence

...the purely formal match of environmental structure to nonspatial structure. Are big places associated with big groups and main channels with main flows? (p 138)

Design (urban, architecture)
Architecture

Lynch (1984)

Good City Form

similarity

Long before he can think about 'similar' figures the child can directly perceive whether figures having different dimensions possess similar relationships (p 321).

Psychology

Piaget and Inhelder (1967)

The Child's Conception of Space