What are spatial skills?

Examples of spatial skills are the abilities to translate 2-D objects to 3-D and to mentally rotate 3-D objects.  Although these skills are used across many disciplines, including engineering, architecture, geology, medicine and computer science, not everyone has good spatial skills. Many people who have poor spatial skills believe it is something “they are just not good at”.  Even good students can have poor spatial skills that can be barriers to learning.

The truth is that spatial skills are malleable – they can be learned!

Dr. Sheryl Sorby, founder and CEO of Higher Education Services, is an internationally renowned researcher and consultant in spatial training. Based on her extensive research, she has created a spatial training program, Developing Spatial Thinking, including a proven curriculum to improve students’ spatial skills.

We invite you to explore…

…the capabilities of Higher Education Services, the experience of Dr. Sheryl Sorby and the “Developing Spatial Thinking” curriculum. Higher Education Services’ mission is to advance spatial research and training worldwide, empowering students to be successful in their studies and ultimately their careers.

Popular Resources about Spatial Skills

Spatial Visualization: A Promising Intervention for Promoting Student Equity (webinar recording)

Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Course – A bit of education can erase a definitive cognitive gap between men and women

Can Teaching Spatial Skills Help Bridge the STEM Gender Gap? 

Spatial Instruction just got easier

With the abrupt change to remote instruction, we’re finding that too much screen time can negatively impact students. There is such a thing as Zoom fatigue! We’ve created a hybrid version of our spatial training course that includes a new sketching only workbook. You can use your own LMS for spatial quizzes that don’t involve sketching.

This can give students a break from their screens to engage in pencil and paper sketching and can be a welcome change.

Explore these new resources for new times.

Explore Sketching Resources

Spatial Resources

Plan your spatial training using  “Developing Spatial Thinking”, a proven spatial training curriculum developed by Dr. Sorby.

Projects

Partner with Dr. Sorby on your project for expert research, grant development, project evaluation or advisory services.

Services

Educate your team about the value of spatial training by bringing Dr. Sorby to speak at your school, campus or conference.

Dr. Sorby is a frequent speaker around the globe sharing her research on the significance and value of spatial training.

Watch Dr. Sorby’s TEDx talk in which she shares how her interests in spatial training developed, and the impact spatial training can have on students of all ages.

What People Are Saying

We value Sheryl’s work so much at the University of Limerick, Ireland that we recently integrated her spatial skills intervention into our freshman initial technology teacher education programme. The intervention has proven to be both effective and enjoyable for students of all levels of spatial ability.

Sheryl is an amazing leader, a dynamic teacher, an excellent researcher, and scholar of distinction. I have benefitted greatly in my professional career from her mentoring and groundbreaking work in visualization and spatial skills research.

As an engineer myself, I found tremendous value in hearing Sheryl relay the importance of 3D spatial skills from the research-based literature.  The actual teaching materials she has created are extremely well done and expertly convey the information to people of all ages – older elementary students up through the teachers themselves.  At the Harpeth Hall School, we are adding the materials throughout the middle school mathematics curriculum as well as in our upper school engineering course.

As an engineer I intuitively understand the effectiveness of Spatial Visualization training, and this effectiveness has been demonstrated by the research of Prof. Sorby. We have used Sorby’s Spatial Visualization training material at University of California, San Diego with very successful outcomes. Not only have the students improved their skills, but they have enjoyed the course and completed work even when it is elective. We are looking forward to the new and improved web based version.

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