Integrating Indigenous Cultural-Based Learning to Enhance Spatial Reasoning among Canadian Secondary School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the effectiveness of an Indigenous cultural-based learning (ICBL) approach in enhancing spatial reasoning among Canadian secondary school students. Recognizing that spatial thinking is a foundational skill for mathematics, science, and geography education, the research explores how integrating Indigenous cultural knowledge—particularly First Nations’ geometric patterns, Inuit mapping traditions, and Métis beadwork symmetry—can support students’ conceptual understanding of spatial relationships. A quasi-experimental design was implemented with 238 Grade 9 students from two public secondary schools in British Columbia. The experimental group received twelve weeks of geometry instruction incorporating Indigenous cultural contexts, while the control group followed a conventional curriculum. Spatial reasoning was measured using the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotation (PSVT:R) and a spatial problem-solving assessment developed for this study. ANCOVA results revealed a significant improvement in spatial reasoning scores in the experimental group (F(1,235)=18.72, p<0.001, η²=0.074), indicating that culturally embedded pedagogies effectively enhanced students’ spatial understanding. Qualitative feedback from students also highlighted greater engagement, cultural appreciation, and cognitive flexibility. The findings contribute to growing evidence on the pedagogical value of cultural responsiveness in STEM education and underscore the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge as a legitimate epistemological framework in Canadian classrooms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".