Abstract: Males score significantly higher in spatial ability than females. Primary and secondary education neglect spatial ability to focus on verbal and numerical skills only. Standardised tests such as the SAT or the WAIS-IV IQ test deliberately neglect or diminish measures of spatial ability to remove sex differences.
Spatial ability is the capacity to understand spatial relations among objects or space. Visual-spatial abilities are used for everyday use from navigation, understanding or fixing equipment, and performing on a job. Spatial abilities are important for success in fields such as sports, driving, military, law enforcement, mathematics, natural sciences, construction, trade jobs, machinery tasks, engineering, architecture, graphic design, musical performance, doctoring, surgery, chemistry and physics.
In 2013 Kell and Lubinksi came out with their paper ‘Spatial Ability: A Neglected Talent in Educational and Occupational Settings’. They found that "students especially talented in spatial visualization relative to their status on mathematical and verbal reasoning are particularly likely to be underserved by our educational institutions." and that "what is needed is the incorporation of spatial ability into talent identification procedures and research on curriculum development and training". This means that it is possible for talented individuals to complete their secondary and even tertiary education without understanding their own talent.
Current assessment practices in education and industry lead to a substantial missed opportunity. Many spatially talented adolescents, for example, may never approach their full potential due to a lack of opportunities to develop their skills. A great loss occurs at talent searches that identify intellectually precocious young adolescents. Current talent search procedures focus on the assessment of mathematical and verbal ability, and many programs require scores within the top 1% to qualify (Colangelo et al., 2004). Most major talent searches do not include tests of spatial aptitude, however, and due to variability in specific ability profiles, these procedures exclude a large numbers of spatially gifted students. One recent estimate suggested over half: Wai et al. (2009), for example, estimated that only 30% of the top 1% in spatial ability also score within the top 1% in mathematical or verbal reasoning (Wai et al., 2009). Consequently, the vast majority of spatially talented young adolescents are being denied admittance to talent search programs. Going back in time, an example from Terman’s (1925–1959) longitudinal study of gifted youth (top 1% in individually administered IQ tests) is instructive. Terman used only the verbally oriented Stanford-Binet (Terman, 1916) test to identify participants, rather than separately assessing verbal and mathematical ability; unfortunately, two subsequent Nobel Laureates in Physics (Shockley and Alvarez) were measured and missed by Terman and his colleagues (Shurkin, 1992). Now that modern talent searches routinely utilize measures of mathematical and verbal reasoning for identification and selection, it is unlikely that they are missing many contemporary young adolescents like Alvarez and Shockley—but whether they are missing a modern-day Thomas Edison or Henry Ford is an open question.
It has been well established that there are significant sex differences in spatial ability. Males significantly outperform females, and the findings are consistent. A male advantage is observed across cultures and in infants as young as 5 months, while sex differences are equally large in 9 year old's as they are in adults. This is especially significant as girls mature faster than boys. Sex differences in other cognitive traits are negligible, and therefore it is worth exploring the causes behind this disparity. Spatial ability assists in physical tasks such hunting and fighting, which were typically male domains for thousands of years. Thus males with higher spatial ability were selected for over time. This theory can help explain the observed male advantage in sports that are not reliant on size, strength or speed, such as car racing, shooting, lawn bowls, snooker and esports.
So spatial ability is neglected by our education systems, and the reasons may be cultural. Where there was once a focus on equality of opportunity, there is now a focus on equality of outcome. A curriculum that incorporates spatial activities may be vulnerable to criticism if it displays a male advantage. Academic institutions fervently strive to avoid accusations of bias of any form. The results have had global ramifications on our youth. Millions of talented students lose interest in learning, lose faith in their education system and have difficulty finding the right career path. Neglecting spatial ability affects people with autism in particular, who have an even greater spatial tilt than typical males.
The focus on gender equality extends even to current standardised tests, including IQ tests. A 1995 meta-analysis explored sex differences across multiple spatial test batteries.
The second column displays the sex differences. A positive number is a male advantage, a negative number means the test has a female advantage. Results are between 0 and 1 (or -1), with the weaker results being closer to 0. We can see that across the 12 tests used, not a single test displayed a female advantage. We can also see that the Block Design test displays one of the weakest results. Interestingly, Block Design is perhaps the most widely used spatial assessment in the world, featured in the popular WAIS-IV IQ test. Visual Puzzles is another spatial test in the WAIS-IV which requires mentally rotating and fitting 2D shapes together. However, it is important to consider other cognitive functions when interpreting VP performance:
The results indicate that Visual Puzzles is not a pure measure of visuoperceptual reasoning, at least in a mixed clinical sample, because memory, mental flexibility, processing speed, and language abilities also contribute to successful performance of the task (Fallows et al., 2011).
Mental Rotation is a spatial ability task that shows the largest sex difference, along with tests involving movement such as the Multiple Object Tracking test. According to intelligence researchers, the more complex a test is, the more it relies on g (general intelligence). Mental rotation involving 2D figures is more simple than rotation of 3D figures. That is why we see that Cards Rotation Test has a smaller sex difference (0.31) than Mental Rotations Test (0.67). Static spatial tests are less complex than moving tests, which is why the MOT (not in the study) has one of the highest sex differences, as well as a strong correlation with sporting ability.
Amazingly, sex differences are so ingrained into spatial ability, that spatial traits have become genetically paired with traits of genetic health. Exposure to natural stressors - parasites, poor nutrition and social stress - will adversely affect spatial performance in males only. Thus spatial ability can be a signal of genetic health to potential female mates, along with other sexually dimorphic traits such as height or muscularity. Older males and female rats both see an improvement in spatial ability when given testosterone, while castrated male rats, or males with IHH are below-average. Spatial ability can also help explain the significant sex difference in brain volume that exists even after controlling for body size.
A study by Amponash and Krekling (1997) used 4 spatial tests to examine sex differences across cultures.
This issue was addressed by using four visual spatial ability tests (water level, surface development, PMA space, and Vandenberg-Kuse) to collect data from university students in Ghana (n = 197) and Norway (n = 220). Except for the Surface Development test, on which no sex difference appeared in either sample, males performed significantly better than females in both samples... Results showed that patterns and magnitudes of sex differences in spatial abilities were similar across cultures.
75% of Norweigan males got all 6 questions correct compared to 40% of females. 10% of males got 0 correct compared to 28% of females. Constant attempts to close the gender gap by altering test formats and providing spatial training have proven ineffective.
Spatial training has been only modestly effective at improving the performance on the water-level task. A training procedure was developed that involved having college students proceed from easier to more difficult problems along a dimension of increasingly greater competing perceptual cues. The training was effective in (1) eliminating the gender differences on the drawing task, and (2) significantly improving females' knowledge of the physical (invariance) principle, although not to the level of males. Training effects did not transfer to a related spatial task.
The 1997 study also mentions that the Surface Development test was the only test that showed no sex difference. The Surface Development test has been shown to be a poor correlate to 'challenging manual spaceflight tasks', compared to the Guay's Visualisation of Views 3D test.
The link is clear. Tests that display large sex differences also display strong correlations with performance on physical, coordination-dependent tasks. These tests also show lower practice effects and test-retest reliability. Therefore it can be safely assumed that the greater the sex difference on a given battery, the greater the spatial loading is.
Spatial ability in children predicts adult expertise in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and "including spatial ability in modern talent searches would identify many adolescents with potential for STEM who are currently being missed" (Wai et al., 2009). With modern technology becoming all-encompassing, STEM is the fastest growing industry in the world. It is by far the strongest contributor to innovation and scientific discovery and as a result is arguably the largest contributor to national economies. There are campaigns in every developed country to increase the amount of STEM graduates in order to keep up with rising jobs. Given the greater capacity to work from home for STEM jobs, it is most certainly the future.
Workforce needs of the 21st century have raised a call worldwide for greater education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Yet, as more STEM students graduate, millions of STEM jobs in both developed and emerging countries are going unfilled.
Spatial ability is important in all STEM fields, especially engineering. Female presence in STEM fields is notoriously low. In 2016 in Australia, women comprised only 17% of the STEM qualified population. Female participation in STEM subjects is significantly lower for all steps of the education system. Because of this, there have been significant efforts to improve female STEM graduation in developed countries, to no avail. The Australian government explains the reasons:
Women’s participation is lower for a variety of reasons, from cultural barriers in the workplace through to women being more likely to be a primary carer for children or other family members... Girls and women, especially those from minority groups, rural and remote areas and disadvantaged backgrounds, face multiple barriers to STEM participation and as a result have to overcome more challenges than their male counterparts. Factors such as bias and stereotyping, career insecurity, a lack of flexible work arrangements, and lack of female role models have been demonstrated to greatly influence girls and women’s decisions to enter and remain in STEM education and careers.
However, we can see from Stoet et al. (2018) that perceptions of cultural gender inequality as the cause are misguided since "the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality". The simplest explanation is that STEM disparities are reflective of disparities in spatial ability. Given that STEM is a field that also relies on higher levels of general intelligence, the greater male variability hypothesis plays a role too. Females cluster closer to the mean than males in cognitive ability, as well as other areas. Therefore, there are more low-skilled and high-skilled workers among the male population. Accordingly, there are more male STEM graduates, and again even more male STEM professors (proportionally).
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> Abstract: Males score significantly higher in spatial ability than females. Primary and secondary education neglect spatial ability to focus on verbal and numerical skills only. Standardised tests such as the SAT or the WAIS-IV IQ test deliberately neglect or diminish measures of spatial ability to remove sex differences.
And this is why the smarter female students, accustomed to succeeding in school without effort, run into their first college level physics course like a brick wall.
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