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 "spatial hierarchy"

hierarchy

Provide evidence of linkage, dominance, subordination, and embeddedness (p. 87)

Geography

Golledge, et al. (2008)

Matching geospatial concepts with geographic educational needs

hierarchy

A spatial hierarchy consists of nested areas of different sizes. This concept is easy to illustrate with political areas. A state, for example, is part of a larger country, and at the same time it has smaller counties within it (and those counties may have cities within them, and neighborhoods within cities, and so on). The idea of a spatial hierarchy, however, can also be applied to watersheds, wholesale distribution areas, professional baseball farm teams

Geography

Gersmehl and Gersmehl (2007)

Spatial thinking by young children. Neurologic evidence for early development and "educability"