Coffee Hour: Temporal and Spatial Learning in the Geosciences

Spatial reasoning plays an important role in most scientific disciplines. The talk will present an interdisciplinary research program that focuses on the spatial thinking skills in the geosciences, a discipline where spatial relations are central to the science.  The talk will present work on
characterizing the spatial skills of expert geologists.  Recent research indicates that solving real complex spatial problems demands skills that have received scant study by the cognitive science community. Understanding these skills offers new perspectives on teaching geosciences to students struggling to learn to think spatially.


Thomas F. Shipley is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University.  He is broadly interested in the psychology of understanding events.  Recent work has focused on understanding how people represent and reason about events in the geosciences.  Dr Shipley is a core investigator in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center - an NSF funded science of learning center - where he heads the research strand on undergraduate geosciences education. His research is also supported by a TUES grant to develop a workbook for training penetrative spatial thinking, and a FIRE grant to understand how people infer spatial processes from spatial observations.