1. Mental Rotations: You spin me right round…
Eric Riggs, Texas A&M University
Carol J. Ormand, SERC, Carleton College

2. Overview What is Mental Rotation? So who cares?
the ability to rotate the orientation of successful visual mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects
It is not the ability to rotate oneself relative to a fixed external frame – that is perspective taking and perhaps navigation – a discrete skill
So who cares?
Mental rotations have been investigated formally since the early 1970s – Shepard and Metzler
In the 1980s and 90s it was associated with the rate of cognitive spatial processing skill and general intelligence (problematic as that is to define)
MR skill is strongly associated with success in STEM fields

3. 5 minutes of experiential learning: Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT:R) Yoon 2011 after Bodner and Guay 1997

4. Key papers and assessment instruments

5. Shepard and Metzler, 1971
Found response time to vary with angular rotation amount
Lab setting – highly individualized testing
Rotation restricted to axes registered to the drawing plane
No hidden features or parts

6. Vandenberg and Kuse, 1978
Adapted Shepard & Metzler style testing to paper and pencil testing, not lab settings
Found major sex differences, and in many ways gave birth to the notion that men outperform women in spatial tasks

7. Peters and Battista, 2008
Sex differences reduced or eliminated with different measurement approach
Avoided the multiple figures in each problem in favor of pairwise presentations – isolated sex differences to information processing rather than spatial ability or skill
Practice effects noticeable
Related work by Peters (1995) acknowledged attempts to tease out noted effects in major field choice, handedness, ethnicity and sex

8. PVR – Bodner and Guay, 1997
Driven by S/M and V/K–esque goals to understand STEM performance, but a desire to find instruments resistant to analytical processing in favor of gestalt processing, especially in chemistry education
Found a strong correlation to both spatial and non-spatial task performance
Found a strong correlation with performance on novel problems
“As a result, we believe that tests of spatial ability, such as the ROT test described in this paper, can be used for a variety of purposes besides predicting which students will have difficulty with spatial tasks in chemistry or to probe which students might have difficulty abstracting relevant information from two-dimensional models projected on a computer screen. They can also be used to probe students’ problem-solving ability.”

9. What do we know within Geology?
Studies of field-based problem solving (Riggs and Balliet, 2009 – GSA)
in general, course and exercise performance was not predicted by good PVR and GeoSAT scores, but poor performance was typically linked to lower scores
Many other contributing factors lead to problem solving success in field geology (Balliet 2012, Balliet, Riggs, Maltese 2015), but spatial skill is a “table stakes” issue

11. Map quality and PVR
High PVR score (19)
Low PVR score (7)

14. Other applications
Post-course rankings of oil company field training & recruiting exercises tend to follow PVR scores – lower scores tend to map to low rankings
BP and potentially Shell use MRT testing to screen applicants for geoscience positions
Mental rotations work in crystallography generates better spatial skills scores but not necessarily better mineralogy skills
Mental rotations appear to be necessary but not sufficient for success at spatial geologic tasks

15. Implications, Strategies, and Tools for Teaching (“That’s great, but how can I use it in my classroom?”)

16. We’ll spend the rest of this hour in exploration (“That’s great, but how can I use it in my classroom?”)
Crystallographic rotation/crystal systems
Crystal symmetry and gesture
Visible Geology
Stereonets and rotations?
Other strategies??

17. References
Balliet, R.N., 2012, Evaluation of undergraduate geologists' problem solving and cognition during field exams using a mixed methods approach, Doctoral Dissertation, Purdue University, docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI /
Balliet, R.N., Riggs, E.M., and Maltese A.V., 2015, Students’ Problem Solving Approaches for Initiating and Developing Geologic Models in the Field, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, special issue on Disciplinary-Based Post Secondary-Education Research 52(8), DOI: /tea.21236
Bodner, G.M. and RB. Guay, 1997, The Purdue Visualizations of Rotations Test, The Chemical Educator, v2, n4
Maeda, Y., Yoon, S. Y., Kang, G., Imbrie, P.K. (2013).The Validation of the Revised PSVT:R for measuring First Year Engineering Students’ Spatial Ability. International Journal of Engineering Education 29(3),
Peters, M. and C. Battista, 2008, Applications of mental rotation figures of the Shepard and Metzler type and description of a mental rotation stimulus library, Brain and Cognition, v66, 260–264
Riggs, Eric M. and Balliet, R.N., 2009, A Role for Mental Rotations in Field-Based Problem Solving, Spatial Skills in the Geosciences, Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 41, No. 7, p. 195
Shepard, R. N. and Metzler, J. “Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects” Science, 1971, 171, 701.
Vandenberg, S.G. and A. R. Kuse, Mental rotations, a group test of three-dimensional spatial visualization, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 47, 1978, pp. 599–604.
Yoon, S. Y., Psychometric properties of the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (The Revised PSVT:R), Doctoral Dissertation, Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Order Number: ), 2011.