The innovative teaching method aiming to reverse plummeting maths attainment in Scotland's schools

With the backing of philanthropists and the Scottish Government, the University of Glasgow has launched a large-scale research pilot to improve spatial reasoning.

The aim is to boost children’s understanding of how to imagine and work with complex information, developing skills that will improve attainment in numbers and science.

It comes against the backdrop of declining performance in STEM subjects. Pisa world rankings published at the end of 2023 showed the performance of Scotland’s youngsters had dropped 18 points in maths, 11 points in reading and seven points in science since 2018 to be below the OECD average for the first time.

At Kelvindale Primary, one of the schools involved in the three-year science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM] SPACE research pilot, youngsters are given brightly coloured plastic bricks and challenged to build and count with them.

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The classroom is buzzing with noise as pupils work together to collaborate on what they are learning.

Head teacher Gillian Roulston said the school joined the pilot in June last year, alongside the Clevedon learning community.

While the primary school performs well at P1 and P7 measures, performance dips at primary four, so Mrs Roulston was keen to consider steps that would boost maths attainment for her pupils.

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Kelvindale, where 42 different languages are spoken, is an unusual case study in that, for a Glasgow school, it has relatively low numbers of youngsters from the most deprived postcodes.

Those young people who are in SIMD1 tend to perform well because they have come on placing requests or from overseas “so learning is valued”. Boys also tend to outperform girls at the Glasgow primary, which is opposite to the national picture.

The work on spatial reasoning has been spearheaded by the school’s probationary teacher. Once the pilot is over, Mrs Roulston said the school would like to revisit some of the language used to make the system more inclusive.

Otherwise, though, she said they are seeing real success.

The Turner Kirk Centre for Spatial Reasoning has been launched by Glasgow University with help from the Turner Kirk Trust and UBS Optimus Foundation.

Professor Quintin Cutts is director of the centre and a professor of computer science education. He explains the verbal side of the brain receives an excellent workout in education, but little is done explicitly to improve the visual side of the brain.

His research was prompted by trying to understand why two students with identical qualifications might vary so dramatically with regard to spatial reasoning.

Prof Cutts’s hypothesis rests on the way the brain is used - playing outside, playing with certain games, doing certain activities. Girls tend to have poorer spatial reasoning than boys because toys traditionally marketed at boys work on that specific skill. So, looking at Lego kits, boys will be encouraged to create and build while girls are urged to make stories.

Children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds will also have less well developed skills in this area. Research so far shows it takes just 16 90-minute lessons for girls are pupils from deprived backgrounds to catch up.

This tracks with research carried out with university students - first-year students take just ten hours of spatial skills training to match their peers.

“Our hypothesis is not that people give up doing STEM in secondary because it's boring, which is the mantra,” Prof Cutts said.

“It’s that if you cannot conceptualise something, because you don't have the cognitive apparatus, you're not going to enjoy and so you're going to drop it.”

The hope - although Prof Cuts is clear the outcome remains uncertain - is that pupils will increasingly want to study STEM when they have these new skills. In workplaces, he said, there was an argument for spatial awareness training for adults to help them be more comfortable in the use of technology.

For now, however, the focus is very much on primary pupils.

The centre aims to reach 40 per cent of Scottish classrooms by 2028, helping children understand where things are in relation to each other, how they fit together, and how they move or change.

The link between spatial reasoning and maths ability is well known, but has largely been overlooked worldwide as a mechanism for improving education and performance in STEM subjects.

The establishment of the centre builds on the initial success of a University of Glasgow-led project that has shown that applying spatial learning to some maths lessons, while teaching the same core curriculum, improves performance in the subject by an average of 20 per cent.

The earlier study, led by Prof Cutts and Dr Jack Parkinson of the university’s School of Computing Science, was tested in primary 4 classes.

Dubbed the Spatial Cognition Enhancement Project (STEM SPACE), the study also showed similar success in reducing gender and economic deprivation-based gaps in maths skills, and even improved skills in unexpected areas, such as collaboration, creativity, and communication.

STEM SPACE uses MathsBURST, a sequence of spatial learning materials provided by partners in Australia, but adapted for the Scottish curriculum.

In 2023, the first year of the project, the teaching model was deployed in P4 classes in 22 schools. In 2024, 80 schools across six local authorities, involving 2,300 pupils in a mix of P4 and P5 classes, successfully trialled the teaching model.

It is hoped in the long term it will be a template for a “transformative education model” that can be replicated by other nations and educational institutions.

The Turner Kirk Centre for Spatial Reasoning is being match-funded by the Turner Kirk Trust, a charitable trust that supports experimental initiatives in STEM and biodiversity.

Ewan Kirk, co-founder of the Turner Kirk Trust, said it was incumbent on philanthropists to take the risk when funding new projects but, ultimately, it is hoped the Scottish Government will fund the scheme.

Mr Kirk said: “I completely understand that this is not solving every problem that every Scottish school could have. We're not trying to boil the ocean.

“But one of the things I like about this is it just takes the whole Bell curve and shifts to the right. Everyone gets a little bit better, and that kind of little incremental improvement means big improvements to people's lives. And it costs very, very little.”