Research Projects › Spatial Thinking in Hydrogeology
How do hydrogeologists — students and experts alike — use three-dimensional spatial thinking to predict how contamination moves through the shallow subsurface?
This project serves the national interest by improving the education of a diverse and capable geoscience and environmental workforce. We aim to advance understanding of the spatial reasoning hydrogeologists draw on when they predict contaminant movement underground — a task that is inherently three-dimensional and hidden from view.
Project Outcomes
This project investigated the role of spatial thinking in learning and practicing hydrogeology — the study of water movement through the subsurface and its connections to surface water. Hydrogeologists must mentally synthesize data from maps, well logs, cross-sections, and contaminant concentration measurements to build a picture of what is happening underground. Despite the clearly visual, three-dimensional nature of the discipline, researchers had not previously identified which specific spatial thinking skills make this reasoning possible, nor how students develop and use them. Over four and a half years, the project addressed both questions, producing empirical findings, validated tools, and professional development resources with direct application to hydrogeology education and workforce preparation.
Intellectual Merit
We recruited 72 participants, ranging from undergraduate students to professional hydrogeologists with more than a decade of experience. Each completed a battery of validated spatial thinking tests, a hydrogeology knowledge assessment developed for the project, and a contaminated-site characterization task — a realistic problem requiring participants to determine groundwater flow direction and predict contaminant movement through the subsurface. Using hierarchical regression modeling, we identified two spatial thinking skills that significantly predict performance: visual penetrative ability (visualizing interior structures from external clues) and working in multiple frames of reference (mentally holding and switching between spatial perspectives). Together with hydrogeology knowledge, these two skills accounted for nearly half of the variability in task performance. At low levels of hydrogeology knowledge, strong spatial thinking skills translated to more than a 25% performance advantage — a finding with direct implications for instruction.
A complementary qualitative study observed 26 upper-level geoscience students working through the hydrogeology task in small groups, capturing their conversations, gestures, and use of manipulatives. The most challenging element was the potentiometric surface — an abstract concept describing the level to which groundwater would rise in a well. Students frequently confused it with land-surface topography, struggled to visualize it as a three-dimensional object, and had difficulty drawing contour lines to represent it. Drawing on spatial thinking theory, we explain these struggles in terms of the cognitive demands of switching between intrinsic and extrinsic spatial thinking, and the challenge of reasoning about potential rather than actual water movement.
A third study examined how spatial thinking skills affect performance on the hydrogeology knowledge assessment itself. More than half of the assessment items required spatial thinking, and spatial thinking skills predicted performance on those items — particularly for participants with greater experience. This has implications for how researchers and instructors design and interpret assessments across STEM fields.
Broader Impacts
The project produced two classroom-ready tools now available to the broader teaching community: the contaminated-site characterization task and the hydrogeology knowledge assessment, both publicly available through the Towson University ScholarWorks repository. They give instructors a validated, research-based way to challenge students with authentic problems and measure conceptual understanding — resources that did not previously exist for this discipline.
The project also trained the next generation of geoscience education researchers. At Towson University, four undergraduate students gained hands-on experience in human-subjects research, data collection, and scientific communication. Graduate students at Western Michigan University, including the lead author of the third paper, developed advanced quantitative and qualitative research skills as part of their doctoral training.
Results reached practicing educators directly. At the 2024 Earth Educators' Rendezvous, the team hosted a full-day workshop, “Pedagogies and Practices for Boosting Spatial Understanding of Fluid Earth,” attended by roughly 20 hydrogeology and fluid-Earth science instructors. Findings were also shared across more than fifteen presentations at national conferences including the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the NSF IUSE Summit.
This work lays an evidence-based foundation for curricula designed to help students who enter hydrogeology without strong spatial skills succeed in a discipline society urgently needs. With labor projections showing greater-than-average demand for hydrogeologists, improved instruction directly supports a capable workforce equipped to address water quality, contamination remediation, and sustainable water resource management.
Project Members
Learn More
- Two Faculty Awarded a Grant to Better Prepare Hydrogeology Workforce (Towson News)
- WMU Faculty Awarded NSF Grant to Explore Fast-Growing Hydrogeology Field
