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 "cycle"

cycle

Regular shifts between maximum and minimum values of a local variable with time; i.e. oscillations or waves with periods, wavelengths and amplitudes. The tides, seasons and long-term climate shifts are cycles. Reproduction timing is synchronized (in phase) with solar, lunar and tidal cycles. Sleep patterns follow circadian (daily) rhythms.

Science Education

Mathewson, J. H. (2005)

The visual core of science: definition and applications to education

cycle

We experience our world and everything in it as embedded within cyclical processes: day and night, the seasons, the course of life (birth through death), the stages of development in plants and animals, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Most fundamentally, a cycle is a temporal circle (p 119). The CYCLE schema manifests a definite recurring internal structure...constitut(ing) one of our most basic patterns for experienceing and understanding temporality (p 121)

Linguistics
Philosophy

Johnson, M. (1987)

The Body in the Mind

cycle

[OED]: 3. a. A recurrent round or course (of successive events, phenomena, etc.); a regular order or succession in which things recur; a round or series which returns upon itself.

Linguistics

OED Online (2nd Ed.)

Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition