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 "mass"

magnitude

The dimensions, extent, scale, or size of objects or events; also the value (greater or lesser) of a variable obtained from measurements and expressed as a quantity together with a reference to an accepted measurement scale (the units). The units for most physical variables are combinations of mass, length and time (dimensional analysis). The term order of magnitude is applied to a change by a power of ten in a value. Values ranging over many orders of magnitude are frequently expressed in non-linear form such as a logarithmic (or exponential) scale.

Science Education

Mathewson, J. H. (2005)

The visual core of science: definition and applications to education

mass

[OED]: 1a. A dense aggregation of objects having the appearance of a single, continuous body

5b. Physics. The quantity of matter which a body contains, as measured by its acceleration under a given force or by the force exerted on it by a gravitational field; an entity possessing mass.

Linguistics

OED Online (2nd Ed.)

Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition