Disciplinary trends in spatial concept associations: a multifaceted analysis of student responses

This study addresses a critical need to better understand how students conceptualize spatial knowledge across disciplinary contexts, a key issue for improving spatial thinking in education. Although spatial cognition has been widely studied, existing research predominantly relies on standardized performance-based assessments, which provide limited insight into how learners cognitively organize and associate spatial concepts across disciplines. This reveals a significant gap in capturing the conceptual and interdisciplinary dimensions of spatial understanding.

To address this limitation, a stimulus-based word association task was administered to 417 middle school students in Türkiye, yielding 16,680 responses categorized into four disciplinary orientations: mathematics, geography, both, or neither. Reliability was established through expert coding and Fleiss' Kappa, and analyses included chi-square tests, principal component analysis, hierarchical clustering, and non-parametric comparisons.

The findings reveal systematic disciplinary patterns in students' conceptualizations: while slope, scale, and area are predominantly associated with mathematics, concepts such as coordinate, location, and graph function as interdisciplinary connectors. In contrast, environment and distance show weak disciplinary anchoring, suggesting more context-dependent interpretations. Significant differences were also observed across gender, transportation mode, and disciplinary orientation.

By introducing an associative-response approach, this study extends current spatial cognition research beyond performance-based measures and provides empirical evidence for discipline-oriented patterns in spatial thinking. The findings suggest that spatial cognition is not solely a domain-general ability but is shaped by educational experiences and disciplinary exposure, offering a refined conceptual perspective for understanding spatial intelligence in educational contexts.