subject: The Important of Diagrams [print this page] The Important of Diagrams The Important of Diagrams
For most scientific and engineering contexts, diagrams are meant to convey not just the structure of a system but also its behavior or the causal chain of its parts or the function of its operations. These are exactly the aspects of diagrams that students of all ages find difficult. Diagrams show structure, but they do not show function or behavior or causal relations. Language can compensate by stating this information directly. However, diagrams can also be enriched with extrapictorial devices, notably lines, arrows, boxes, and brackets, to convey abstract information. For example, when asked to describe a diagram of a bicycle pump, students describe the structural relations among the parts. When arrows are added to the diagram that denote the sequence of actions of the pump, students describe the causal, functional actions of the pump. Even the addition of arrows may not be sufficient to convey the functional information. For understanding bicycle pumps and car brakes, diagrams were sufficient for undergraduates of high mechanical ability but not for those of low ability; for those of low mechanical ability, language compensated. In many educational settings, diagrams are taken for granted. These studies suggest that teaching how to reason from diagrams could reap great benefits.
Such teaching would be needed in a number of domains: geography, arithmetic and mathematics, biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Diagrams are common in history and the humanities as well. Across the curriculum, what is needed is exercises in interpreting the spatial entities and spatial relations of diagrams, making inferences as well as making discoveries. Constructing diagrams is an integral part of this instruction, especially in groups. Junior high school dyads working together produced diagrams of, for example, plant ecology that were more abstract and contained less irrelevant, pictorial information than those produced by individuals. Spatial thinking is a powerful tool. It is fundamental to problem solving in a variety of contexts: in life spaces, physical spaces, and intellectual spaces. In each case, it can offer increasingly powerful understandings, moving from description through analysis to inference. In each case, it depends upon a level of spatial knowledge, skills in spatial ways of thinking and acting, and the development of spatial capabilities.
All of the component skills can, to some significant degree, be learned and this points to the crucial need for education in spatial thinking. For this part, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many students choose Rosetta Stone Hindi and Rosetta Stone Italian to learn Hindi and Italian. The committee shows how spatial thinking plays a fundamental role in everyday fife, the workplace, and science. In everyday life, the necessary skills are rarely learned in formal contexts: we learn by informal means and by doing. In the workplace and scientific contexts, there are increasing demands in terms of levels of spatial knowledge, spatial ways of thinking and acting, and spatial capabilities: those demands are often met by formal instruction. We learn how demands have changed over time (in, forexample, astronomy), how they are met by learning within a domain of knowledge (in, for example, the geosciences), and how some people become particularly skilled at spatial thinking (in the cases of Marie Tharp and Walter Christaller). People use spatial thinking daily, to find the things they need at home and their ways in the world. Spatial tools that everyone possesses can be articulated and refined to turn learners into powerful scientific thinkers.
