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 "line"

continuity

...it is obvious in the case of lines and surfaces there is right from the start a relationship of continuity. But it is a question of knowing in precisely what sense the whole of the perceptual field constitutes a continuous spatial field (p 8). ...we may say that the perception of continuities is modified in terms of the increasing fineness of the thresholds of sensitivity, and consequently of the relationships of proximity and separation (p 8)

Psychology

Piaget and Inhelder (1967)

The Child's Conception of Space

line

The concept of the straight line results from the child's first attempts to relate objects spatially in a system of projective viewpoints or coordinates...Drawing or imagining a straight line...presupposes a projective or euclidean space... (p 155). The construction of a straight line may be defined as the linking of distant points by the interpolation of a series of points along a direct path...(p 155).

Psychology

Piaget and Inhelder (1967)

The Child's Conception of Space