Examining perspective-taking skills in introductory geoscience students

Abstract Despite concerted efforts aimed at improving gender diversity in the discipline, the underrepresentation of women continues to persist in the geoscience domain. Research suggests that successful completion of introductory undergraduate STEM coursework is pivotal to the retention of students in STEM major programs and that spatial skills are fundamental to STEM learning at the introductory level. This study examines the relations between a specific type of spatial skill important to geoscience reasoning, perspective-taking skills, and conventional measures of academic achievement (i.e., grade point average and course-based assessment) critical for continuation in STEM major programs. Additionally, this study queries whether or not students’ perspective-taking skills improve after five-weeks of introductory geoscience coursework, and if this skill differs between genders. Students enrolled in an undergraduate Natural Hazards and Disasters geoscience course completed a measure of perspective-taking at the beginning and midway through the course. Results revealed that students’ perspective-taking skills were not related to their performance on conventional measures of academic achievement, and that they did not improve after five weeks of coursework. However, we did find that men outperform women on the measure of perspective-taking both at the beginning and midway through the course. These findings may have broad implications for interventions aimed at improving the retention of women in geoscience by bolstering women’s perspective-taking skills.


Literary context and introduction
Within the last three decades, there has been a national effort to increase access and improve the retention of U.S. students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major programs.For instance, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently asserted that improvements in STEM undergraduate education are necessary "to ensure the economic strength, national security, global competitiveness, environment, and health of the United States" (NASEM, 2016, p.7).While efforts have succeeded in increasing the number of students who enter STEM fields, losses from these majors remain persistently high.Of all students who enter college intending to major in STEM, recent studies estimate that only about 50% are successful in reaching this goal (Chen & Soldner, 2013).Moreover, a closer examination of the kinds of students leaving the STEM disciplines reveals that undergraduate students who are women leave in much greater proportions than students who are men (Seymour et al., 2019).For instance, 57% of all bachelor's degrees are awarded to women, while, in comparison, women earn less than half of all of the bachelor's degrees (approximately 49.4%) conferred in science and engineering domains (National Science Foundation, 2022).
Despite concerted attempts at increasing the gender diversity of the participants in STEM fields in the U.S. (Moss-Racusin et al., 2018;Pietri et al., 2017), the proportion of women pursuing STEM degrees has remained largely unchanged over the last two decades.Apart from the biological and agricultural sciences where women earn more than half of the bachelor's degrees awarded each year (National Science Foundation, 2022), many of the STEM domains remain far from achieving gender parity.Data collected by the National Science Foundation (2022) indicates that in 2017, women earned less than half of the bachelor's degrees conferred in mathematics and statistics, in the physical sciences, and in the earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences.Additionally, women earned less than a third of the degrees conferred in computer science and engineering.A summary of the percent of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in 2017 in STEM fields is provided in Table 1.
Efforts aimed at understanding the drivers of the low retention rates of women in undergraduate STEM programs have revealed that a lack of ability or low performance in the introductory coursework is not the predominant explanatory factor (Lindberg et al., 2010).Instead, affective (e.g., Ellis et al., 2016), pedagogical (e.g., Weston et al., 2019), and cognitive factors (e.g., Wai et al., 2009) have also been associated with success in the major.For instance, high self-efficacy in STEM predicts retention and persistence in STEM courses and programs (e.g., Geisinger & Raman, 2013;Raelin et al., 2015).Yet, after one term of introductory STEM coursework, high-performing women report lower confidence than high-performing men in their understanding of the content.Women's lower confidence in learning STEM content has been posed as a potential contributor to their departure from STEM programs (e.g., Ellis et al., 2016).Exacerbating the gender difference in students' confidence for learning STEM and contributing to women's exit from their major is the competitive culture of introductory STEM courses.Students who have switched out of their STEM major report that faculty that teach introductory STEM courses employ unmotivating teaching practices, are more distant and dismissive of their students, and seem indifferent to their students' learning in the classroom.Research indicates that these behaviors leave students, markedly women and first-generation students, feeling uncomfortable in approaching their instructor for help with the course content which further undermines their confidence (Weston et al., 2019).
One cognitive factor that has been found to be critical to students' success in STEM domains and that is of interest to the study here is spatial skills.Spatial skills are a set of cognitive skills used to manipulate, organize, reason about, and make sense of spatial relationships in real and imagined spaces (e.g., Atit et al., 2020b).They are used when generating, retaining, retrieving, and transforming well-structured visual images (Lohman, 1996).Several longitudinal studies have found that spatial skills predict STEM degree attainment and STEM employment even after controlling for mathematics and verbal skills (Wai et al., 2009;see Wai & Kell, 2017 for a review).Moreover, STEM experts employ spatial skills when completing tasks within their domain (Atit et al., 2020b).For example, petroleum geologists use spatial skills when deciding on the location for a new oil well.They interpret and visualize the shapes and locations of three-dimensional (3D) geologic structures that exist under the ground from two-dimensional (2D) seismic data.Research indicates that geoscience is amongst the most spatially-demanding fields when comparing across the STEM domains (Hegarty et al., 2010).
Much of what we know about spatial skills today comes from psychological research conducted to understand what makes up this skillset (Linn & Petersen, 1985;McGee, 1979) and their underlying cognitive processes (Shepard & Metzler, 1971).The tasks used to conduct research aimed at identifying the different kinds of spatial skills (Bennett et al., 1947;Guay, 1977) measure isolated spatial skills, or domain-general spatial skills, which are devoid of context.For example, Shepard and Metzler's (1971) seminal work on mental rotation involves the manipulation of 3D figures made up of multiple attached unit cubes.Building on their work, Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) developed a paper-andpencil test of mental rotation using stimuli analogous to those used in the original study.The Mental Rotations Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) and many other measures assessing individual skills in visualizing and manipulating polygon-derived figures, such as the Visualization of Views Test (Eliot & Smith, 1983;Hegarty et al., 2009), the Embedded Figures Test (Oltman et al., 1971), and the Paper Folding Test (Ekstrom et al., 1976), are still prevalently used by researchers and educators today.
In contrast to domain-general spatial skills is domain-specific spatial reasoning.Domain-specific spatial reasoning engages the use of domain-general spatial skills within a field-specific context (see paper by Atit et al., 2020b for further discussion).In the geosciences, examples of domain-specific spatial reasoning include envisioning the topography represented on a topographic map (Atit et al., 2016;Liben & Titus, 2012) or visualizing the 3D geometry of a geologic structure from data available on the 2D face of an outcrop (e.g., Atit et al., 2020b;Compton, 1985;Mogk & Goodwin, 2012).It has been suggested that domain-general spatial skills provide the foundation for the domain-specific spatial reasoning required by STEM experts (Uttal & Cohen, 2012).Thus, understanding the factors that facilitate the development of domain-general spatial skills in undergraduate students could have broad implications for postsecondary STEM outcomes.
One class of domain-general spatial skills that are recognized as fundamental to domain-specific spatial reasoning in the geosciences are large-scale or environmental spatial skills (Hegarty et al., 2010).Environmental spatial skills are involved in everyday wayfinding tasks such as learning the layout of a building or a city (Hegarty & Waller, 2004).One type of environmental spatial skill that has been commonly studied in research on STEM teaching and learning is spatial orientation or perspective-taking (e.g., Carrera et al., 2011;Kozhevnikov et al., 2002;Lowrie & Logan, 2018).This skill involves imagining how a stimulus will appear from another perspective (Eliot & Smith, 1983;Hegarty et al., 2009).Perspective-taking is critically important for many STEM domains and has been reported by domain-specific experts as a highly employed spatial skill in the geosciences (Hegarty et al., 2010).However, the role of perspective-taking skills in novices' learning of geoscience content is unknown.Identifying if and how perspective-taking skills relate to novices' learning of introductory geoscience content could inform the development of interventions aimed at bolstering geoscience outcomes by leveraging and improving students' spatial skills.
A meta-analysis summarizing the findings of 217 studies revealed that domain-general spatial skills are malleable and can be improved through training and practice (Uttal et al., 2013).Moreover, the effects of training are not limited to the task at hand (Feng et al., 2007;Kozhevnikov & Thornton, 2006).For instance, participants who practiced two distinct spatial tasks for 21 days demonstrated transfer of practice gains to novel stimuli for the practiced task, as well as transfer to other, non-practiced spatial tasks (Wright et al., 2008).Additionally, research indicates that the improvement of domain-general spatial skills may not solely result from deliberate practice.Ormand et al. (2014) examined changes in domain-general spatial skills in postsecondary students enrolled in introductory geology, mineralogy, sedimentology and stratigraphy, hydrogeology, structural geology, and tectonics courses at three different institutions.Tests assessing mental rotation, disembedding, and/or penetrative thinking skills were administered to students in the first and last weeks of classes.Results revealed that students' mental rotation skills and penetrative thinking skills significantly improved from the beginning to the end of the course in most or all of the participating courses.However, students' disembedding skills did not improve in most of the participating courses (Ormand et al., 2014).These results suggest that participating in geoscience coursework may improve specific types of domain-general spatial skills in students.As all participating courses did not administer all three of the spatial assessments, inferences about which course topics (e.g., sedimentology and stratigraphy vs. mineralogy) improve which kinds of spatial skills cannot be made.
One limitation of the study by Ormand et al. (2014) is that the research was conducted predominantly in upper-level undergraduate geology courses that are taken by students who have decided to be geology majors.Furthermore, perspective-taking was not included in the battery of spatial skills assessments administered.Broadening participation in geoscience means bolstering all of the skills necessary for future success in geoscience in students who have not yet committed to the major.Thus, identifying if engaging in introductory general education geoscience coursework, which attracts students who are not geoscience or STEM majors, improves students' perspective-taking skills is a critical question for future research.
While the importance of domain-general spatial skills to domain-specific spatial reasoning has been recognized (e.g., Ormand et al., 2017;Sorby, 2007), the role of student demographics on the relation is not well-understood.Much research suggests that there are robust gender differences, in which men outperform women, on many types of domain-general spatial skills (e.g., Halpern, 2012;Miller & Halpern, 2013) with the bulk of the research focusing on the skill of mental rotation (e.g., Feng et al., 2007;Lauer et al., 2019;Linn & Petersen, 1985;Voyer et al., 1995).However, findings on if gender differences persist in perspective-taking skills are mixed.For instance, Fields and Shelton (2006) and Zacks et al. (2000) found no difference between men and women participants' performance on tests of perspective-taking.Yet, Meneghetti et al. (2012) report finding a difference with men showing an advantage over women.None of these studies reported recruiting students engaged in STEM coursework.Thus, it is unknown whether gender differences in perspective-taking will be apparent in introductory geoscience students.
Studies aimed at understanding how to support the development of spatial skills in students suggest that the disparity in skill level between genders may be traced back to differences between men and women's childhood experiences.Although associated with one's biological sex, gender refers to the meanings that societies and individuals ascribe to male and female categories.Research shows that parents make distinctions in how they engage with and rear their female/girl children versus their male/boy children (e.g., Brown & Tam, 2019).A byproduct of these distinctions is that the activities and toys parents provide to girls also differ from those they provide to boys (e.g., Etaugh & Liss, 1992).Many leisure activities traditionally perceived as masculine activities (e.g., playing with video games, blocks, and puzzles; Newcombe et al., 1983) have been found to bolster the development of spatial skills (e.g., Levine et al., 2012;Verdine et al., 2014).Recent work by Gold et al. (2018) indicates that differential experience with these activities potentially underlies the differences found between men and women's performance on domain-general assessments of spatial skills.
To the benefit of women students who may have weaker domain-general spatial skills than their peers who are men as a result of less experience with traditionally masculine leisure activities, research suggests that training domain-general spatial skills can mitigate the gap between men and women's skill levels.Feng et al. (2007) found that 10 h of playing an action video game eliminates the difference between men and women's spatial attention skills and decreases the disparity in mental rotation skills.Miller and Halpern (2013) found that 12 h of training domain-general spatial skills, such as mental rotation, cross-sectioning, and spatial visualization, results in narrowing the initial gender differences in these spatial skills.However, research shows that improvements in spatial skills do not only result from dedicated training but can also occur through engagement with spatial STEM content (Ormand et al., 2014).Yet, it is unknown whether or not engaging in STEM coursework decreases differences between men and women's domain-general spatial skills.Introductory STEM courses, such as introductory geoscience courses, are often a general education requirement for undergraduate degree attainment and therefore attract a broad range of both men and women students.Understanding the impact of introductory STEM courses on closing the gap between men and women's spatial skills may have widespread implications for the recruitment and retention of women in undergraduate STEM major programs.

The current study
The study reported here builds on the research by Ormand et al. (2014) and aims to further our understanding about the domain-general spatial skills important to learning geoscience content.Specifically, we examine perspective-taking skills in students enrolled in an introductory geoscience course and examine the relations between students' perspective-taking skills and conventional measures of academic achievement (i.e., grade point average and course-based assessment) that are important for continuation in STEM major programs (e.g., Chen & Soldner, 2013;Harris et al., 2020;Thompson & Bolin, 2011).We assess perspective-taking skills using the Visualization of Views test because the test is a reliable psychometric measure that has been employed in previous studies on this spatial skill (e.g., Cohen & Hegarty, 2007;Keehner et al., 2008).Moreover, the items on the test ask participants to visualize a 3D object from an imagined perspective, a task commonly employed when completing domain-specific geoscience tasks, such as when reading a map, studying an outcrop (e.g., Shipley & Tikoff, 2016), or picturing the phase of the Moon as seen from the Earth during different positionings of the Earth-Moon-Sun system (e.g., Manduca & Kastens, 2012).Additionally, data suggests that there is an attrition of women from the geosciences prior to obtaining their undergraduate degree (National Science Foundation, 2022).To begin to understand the relations between women's spatial skills and their retention in the discipline, here we examine if there is a disparity between men and women's perspective-taking skills in an introductory undergraduate course.We chose a lower-division introductory course for this study for two reasons: 1) This course is generally completed by students early in their educational trajectories, prior to declaring or deciding upon their ultimate undergraduate major.The early timing of this course in students' educational trajectories allows us to gain valuable insight into students' spatial skills before they have decided to pursue or leave the geosciences; and 2) The course attracts large numbers of women to enroll as it meets an undergraduate general education requirement.

Questions and hypotheses
Informed by prior research, in this study we ask the following research questions.First, how do students' perspective-taking skills relate to conventional academic achievement measures, specifically their current undergraduate grade point average (GPA) and performance on a course-based assessment?Second, does participation in the course improve students' perspective-taking skills.Third, is there a difference between men and women students' perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course?Lastly, if there is a difference between men and women's perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course, does participating in introductory coursework diminish the disparity in performance?
Based on research by Hegarty et al. (2010) suggesting that perspective-taking is a highly employed spatial skill in the geosciences, and that domain-general spatial skills are crucial for domain-specific STEM reasoning (e.g., Miller & Halpern, 2012;Uttal & Cohen, 2012), we hypothesize that students' perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course will be positively related to their performance on a course-based achievement measure.As GPA is the average of the grades attained in each of a student's completed undergraduate courses, which may include both STEM and non-STEM courses, we do not expect perspective-taking skills to be significantly related to GPA in this study.Additionally, as engaging in geoscience coursework has been found to improve some types of domain-general spatial skills (Ormand et al., 2014), we hypothesize that students' perspective-taking skills will improve after engaging in five weeks of coursework.Informed by findings showing that gender differences do persist on measures of spatial skills (e.g., Halpern, 2012;Meneghetti et al., 2012;Miller & Halpern, 2013), we hypothesize that men will exhibit stronger perspective-taking skills than women at the beginning of the course.However, as participating in spatial tasks, such as is often required when learning and reasoning about geoscience content (e.g., Atit et al., 2020b;Shipley & Tikoff, 2016), can mitigate the differences between men and women's spatial skills (e.g., Feng et al., 2007;Miller & Halpern, 2013), we hypothesize that there will be no difference between men and women students' perspective-taking skills after completing five weeks of introductory geoscience coursework.

Methods
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Riverside (Protocol Number HS-19-149; Title of Study: 3D Cognition in the Geosciences).

Study population and setting
This study took place in an Introductory Natural Hazards and Disasters undergraduate geoscience class at a four-year R1 Hispanic-Serving Institution during the winter quarter of 2020.The course content focused on the application of basic principles of climate and plate tectonics to recognition of natural hazards and their mitigation.Topics covered in the course include fires, floods, winds, landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
The course is a large enrollment four unit lower-division geology course which consists of three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion section.Discussion sections are required meetings that occur outside of lecture between smaller groups of students and a graduate student.A maximum of 30 students are enrolled in each discussion section.These meetings provide opportunities for students to ask questions about course content and participate in additional learning activities that were not conducted in the large-lecture setting.During the time of this study, the lecture component of this course was conducted in-person.The discussion sections were split where half of them were conducted in-person and half were conducted remotely (via Zoom).This excluded the first and fifth week of classes where all discussion classes met in-person to administer study measures and demographic surveys.
The class consisted of 440 students of which 182 students consented to participate in this research study and whose data was examined for research purposes (58 men, 117 women, 7 unreported).This sample size was deemed adequate as an a priori power analysis estimates that using an alpha of 0.05, a sample of 128 participants would have 80% power to detect a medium effect size (d = 0.50) to examine the difference between two independent means (two groups).All students enrolled in the course completed the activities described here.However, only data from consented students was examined for this study.Participants were not compensated for their participation.Participants were predominantly of Mexican American/Chicano (44.5%) or East Asian/Asian American (23.1%) origin, as shown in Table 2. Furthermore, the majority of participants identified as first-generation college students, reported holding sophomore undergraduate status, were of non-STEM majors, and had parents whose highest degree was a high school diploma (see Table 3).The average age of the participants in this study was 19.96 years (SD = 2.15; 172 participants reported age information).

Research design
The research presented here is from data collected as part of a larger project examining the effect of online versus in person instruction during discussion sections on students' perspective-taking skills and geoscience content understanding.The research presented here both descriptive and correlational quantitative research methods to answer the designated research questions.All instruments were administered in a paper and pencil format.All students enrolled in the undergraduate geoscience course were asked to complete all measures during their scheduled discussion section as part of assigned course activities.However, only data from consented students was examined for research purposes.Two hundred and eighty-seven students provided their consent to participate in the study.Of the 287 students that consented to participate, 65 students were excluded from data analysis as they did not have complete attendance in the course for the five weeks that were examined in the study timeframe.Lastly, of the 222 students who consented and had perfect attendance, 40 more were removed because of missing data.These students did not complete a VOV pretest, posttest, or the midterm exam.

Demographic questionnaire
The demographic questionnaire, which has been provided in the supplementary materials, included 11 items.Items asked about the student's age, gender, race/ethnicity, number of science classes the student had taken, first-generation student status, major, cohort, and current undergraduate GPA.

Visualization of views test
To measure perspective-taking skills, students completed the Visualization of Views Test (VOV; Hegarty et al., 2009;Keehner et al., 2008).For this study, the test which initially had 24 items, was split into two assessments containing 12 items each.One assessment was administered as a pretest and the other was administered as a posttest.Participants had eight minutes to complete each 12-item assessment.For each question, participants were shown a figure "hovering in the middle'' of a cube and then a second image of the exact figure shown from a different perspective, the target figure.For each item, the task was to identify the corner of the cube that would show the figure from the same perspective as the target figure.Following Hegarty et al's.( 2009) method of scoring, participants' score on the assessment was the number of correct items minus the number of incorrect items, divided by 6 (to correct for guessing).The maximum possible score on each assessment is 12.Using Cronbach's alpha, the internal reliability for the pretest was acceptable (α = 0.79).The internal reliability for the posttest was also acceptable (α = 0.77).

Course-based achievement measure
The course-based achievement measure was a 50-item midterm exam administered during the fifth week of the 10-week course.The instructor of the course created the midterm.Exam items assessed student understanding for many domain-specific spatial problems such as understanding and interpreting a topographic map, finding slope, relating explosivity to volcano shape, and fault identification.Students' midterm scores were the sum of the number of items answered correctly.The maximum score on the midterm was 50 points.Three sample items from the exam are provided in the supplementary materials.Notes.Percent totals are calculated using the 182 students who consented to participate in the study.seven students did not report race information.Notes.Percent totals are calculated using the 182 students who consented to participate in the study.six students did not report first-generation student status information and seven students did not report information about their educational level.twenty-four students did not report their major and eight students did not report information about their parents' highest level of education.steM vs. non-steM majors were designated by using the categorization defined by the university of california, riverside's office of institutional research ( 2023).

Procedure
The demographic questionnaires and the VOV pretest were administered by a member of the research team during the first discussion section meeting at the beginning of the course.The VOV posttest was administered by a member of the research team during the fifth discussion section meeting.The fifth discussion section meeting took place prior to the administration of the midterm exam.The midterm exam was administered during lecture in the fifth week of the 10-week quarter.

Results
All analyses were conducted using R version 3.5.3(R Core Team, 2019).Before analyzing the data to answer our research questions, preliminary analyses were conducted to assess the normality of the data examined for this study.

How do students' perspective-taking skills relate to measures of academic achievement?
As preliminary analyses indicated that the data collected in this study violate assumptions of normality, Spearman's correlations were conducted to examine how students' perspective-taking skills relate to students' midterm score and undergraduate GPA (the correlations between all of the measures of interest are provided in Table 5).Spearman's correlations are non-parametric tests conducted to examine the strength of the relation between two variables when the data do not follow a normal distribution (e.g., Myers & Sirois, 2006).Results indicate that there is no relation between VOV pretest score and midterm exam score (r s = 0.08, p = 0.26) or undergraduate GPA (r s = −0.12,p = 0.16).Additionally, there is no relation between VOV posttest score and midterm exam score (r s = 0.11, p = 0.13) or undergraduate GPA (r s = −0.11,p = 0.15).

Does participation in the course improve students' perspective-taking skills?
To answer our research question of if participating in introductory geoscience coursework improved students' perspective-taking skills, the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test was conducted to compare performance on the VOV pretest (M = 4.99, SD = 3.67) to the VOV posttest (M = 5.35, SD = 3.66).Results of the analysis indicate that there was no significant difference between VOV pretest score and VOV posttest score, V = 5272, p = 0.17, r = −0.07.

Is there a gender disparity in perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course?
To answer our research question of if there was a difference between men and women's perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course, the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U Test was conducted to compare VOV pretest score between genders.Results of the analysis indicate that men (M = 6.65,SD = 4.06) performed significantly better than women (M = 4.27, SD = 3.20) on the VOV pretest, W = 4624.5,p < 0.001, r = −0.28.A box plot depicting the difference between men and women's performance is provided in Figure 1.

Does participating in introductory coursework diminish the gender disparity in perspective-taking skills?
As prior analyses revealed that gender differences in perspective-taking skills did persist at the beginning of the course, subsequent analyses were conducted to examine if the disparity diminished after five weeks of participation in introductory geoscience coursework.Another non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was conducted to compare VOV posttest scores between men and women participants.Results of the analysis indicate that men (M = 7.12, SD = 4.18) performed significantly better than women (M = 4.56, SD = 3.12) on the VOV posttest, W = 4704, p < 0.001, r = −0.30.A graph depicting the disparity in men and women's VOV test scores at both the beginning and after five weeks of coursework is provided in Figure 2. A table summarizing the differences in performance between men and women on all measures of interest is provided in Table 6.

Discussion
In this study, we examined perspective-taking skills in undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory general education geoscience course.Findings indicated that students' perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course were not related to their performance on a course-based achievement measure administered midway through the course or their reported undergraduate GPA.Additionally, students' perspective-taking skills did not significantly improve after five weeks of coursework.Analyses examining if perspective-taking skills differed by gender revealed that men showed stronger perspective-taking skills than women both at the beginning and after five weeks of coursework.While research conducted with geoscience experts indicates that large-scale spatial skills may be important for future success in the domain (Hegarty et al., 2010;Nazareth et al., 2019), our study found that perspective-taking skills may not be critical for high achievement in introductory undergraduate geoscience coursework.In our research, introductory geoscience students' perspective-taking skills were not related to their performance on a course-based achievement measure.In research by Hegarty et al. (2010), scientists, humanists, and individuals who had at minimum achieved a bachelor's degree in different disciplines were asked to self-report on their level of spatial skills.Geoscientists had the highest self-report ratings of both environmental and small-scale spatial skills in comparison to participants from other fields (Hegarty et al., 2010).Nazareth et al. (2019) measured and compared the large-scale spatial skills of experienced geoscientists to experts in a non-STEM discipline-psychology, using a virtual navigation paradigm.Results showed that geoscientists demonstrated stronger large-scale spatial skills and higher navigational competence compared to their psychology colleagues (Nazareth et al., 2019).
One potential reason we did not find any relation between students' perspective-taking skills and their performance on a course-based achievement measure is that large-scale spatial skills are most often engaged when carrying out tasks situated in a larger environment, such as navigating or learning the layout of objects in an area (Hegarty & Waller, 2004).In our study, the course-based achievement measure was a paper and pencil exam that focused on introductory-level natural hazards and disasters concepts.While the exam included questions requiring students to engage in domain-specific spatial reasoning, there were no items explicitly requiring students to use their large-scale spatial skills.Thus, the relations between domain-general large-scale spatial skills and domain-specific large-scale spatial reasoning is still unknown.As domain-general spatial skills provide the foundation for more complex domain-specific spatial reasoning (e.g., Atit et al., 2020b;Uttal & Cohen, 2012), identifying the types of geoscience tasks that rely on large-scale spatial skills is an important question for future research.Relatedly, since research suggests that there is a link between strong large-scale spatial skills and geoscience undergraduate degree attainment (Hegarty et al., 2010;Nazareth et al., 2019), pinpointing when in the undergraduate geoscience degree program large-scale spatial skills become important for student learning is a critical area for further investigation.
In line with research findings indicating that specific types of domain-general spatial skills, but not all domain-general spatial skills, significantly improve through engagement in geoscience coursework (Ormand et al., 2014), in our study students' perspective-taking skills did not significantly improve after completing five weeks of an introductory class.Ormand et al. (2014) administered measures of domain-general spatial skills to students in a variety of undergraduate geoscience courses at the beginning and at the end of the term.Their results revealed that students    showed significant improvement on a subset of the spatial skills, and that improvement in each skill varied by the topic of the course (e.g., sedimentology, mineralogy).An essential difference between the research by Ormand et al. (2014) and the study reported here is the time frame between administration of the assessments.Ormand et al. (2014) administered their spatial skills measures at the beginning and at the end of each participating course.In our study, the perspective-taking measure was administered at the beginning and then again halfway through the course.This difference in time frames between pre and post assessments in both studies leaves us unable to deduce if the lack of significant improvement in students' perspective-taking skills in our research was due to the course topic or to the shorter time for engagement with the content.Subsequent studies should examine if students' perspective-taking skills improve after a full term of introductory geoscience coursework.
Adding to the research examining gender differences in perspective-taking skills (Fields & Shelton, 2006;Meneghetti et al., 2012;Zacks et al., 2000), our study found that men introductory geoscience students demonstrate stronger perspective-taking skills than women introductory geoscience students.Meneghetti et al. (2012) found that men outperform women on the Spatial Orientation Test (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001), but Fields and Shelton (2006) and Zacks et al. (2000) did not find this difference when using the same measure.Diverging from prior research, we administered the Visualization of Views Test (Hegarty et al., 2009;Keehner et al., 2008) as a measure of perspective-taking and found that men performed better than women at both time points of administration.Moreover, the studies by Meneghetti et al. (2012), Fields and Shelton (2006), and Zacks et al. (2000) recruited student participants in their studies from the broader undergraduate population.In our study, we recruited student participants from an undergraduate general education geoscience course.What is unclear is the effect of the measure on the disparity in performance between genders.Prior research shows that test characteristics can influence participant performance (e.g., Jansen-Osmann & Heil, 2007;Neuburger et al., 2011).Additionally, it is unknown if perspective-taking skills vary between students with different proclivities and interests.Future research should consider administering multiple measures of perspective-taking to obtain a more accurate assessment of students' skill levels.Studies on perspective-taking should also consider the role of student interests on their performance.

Limitations
One limitation of this study is that the measures, except for the midterm exam, were administered as voluntary assignments for an undergraduate general education introductory geoscience course.Therefore, the data collected in this study was limited to students who consented to participate and completed the measures required for the study.By integrating research into a regular course but not including the research activities as part of regular graded course activities, we may have biased our sample.Students who were not motivated to complete the perspective-taking skill measure or the demographic survey because it was not a required course assignment were not included in the study sample.With IRB approval, future studies should address this limitation by making the research measures required coursework (while maintaining voluntary consent to using this data for research purposes) to increase the rate of completion and generating a more representative dataset.
Another limitation of our study was that we collected data on students' undergraduate GPA using self-report.Studies on the accuracy of self-reported GPA when compared to more objective measures, such as institutional records, report mixed findings.A number of studies indicate that some students overestimate their past academic achievement (e.g., Alexander et al., 1994;Dobbins et al., 1993), while other studies have found that students are remarkably accurate when self-reporting their GPA (e.g., Cassady, 2001;Gray & Watson, 2002;Noftle & Robins, 2007).To ensure further accuracy and reliability of the GPA information examined which allows for more precise conclusions to be drawn, subsequent studies should obtain students' GPA information through institutional record systems.
One final limitation of this study is that the discussion sections for this Natural Hazards and Disasters course were conducted in multiple modalities.Half of the discussion sections were conducted in-person, while the other half of the sections were conducted remotely.As a result, the learning experience for all students in the course was not the same.Research has found that student learning for spatial science content can differ between concrete and virtual learning experiences (e.g., Casselman et al., 2021).Thus, the difference in modality for delivering the small-group learning component of the course may have altered our findings.To ensure that differences in modality of small-group instruction did not diminish any findings on the development of students' spatial skills, future studies should examine students' spatial skills in a course with uniform delivery of instruction.

Implications for education
There are a few implications of the findings from this study to geoscience education and STEM education more generally.First, this research highlights the need for early interventions, perhaps at the K-12 level, focused on bolstering girls'/women's perspective-taking skills.Our research indicates that there is a disparity between men and women's perspective-taking skills in introductory undergraduate geoscience students.Even though we did not find an association between students' perspective-taking skills and two conventional measures of achievement important to continuation in STEM major programs (performance on a course-based assessment and GPA; e.g., Chen & Soldner, 2013;Harris et al., 2020;Thompson & Bolin, 2011), much research suggests that perspective-taking skills and other large-scale spatial skills, are important to further educational attainment in the discipline (e.g., Hegarty et al., 2010;Nazareth et al., 2019).Thus, weaker large-scale spatial skills may be deterring women from pursuing a career in this set of content areas.Supporting the development of perspective-taking skills in women students earlier in their education could have longer term implications for their retention in the domain.
However, to produce a substantial impact on the retention of women in the geoscience undergraduate major, interventions and supports cannot solely be aimed at improving women's cognitive skills (e.g., spatial skills).There is much evidence underlining the role of cognitive and affective factors together shaping students' educational outcomes and experiences (e.g., Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001;Atit et al., 2020a;Bandura, 2005Bandura, , 2012)).This research suggests that it may be more beneficial to pair support for essential cognitive skill sets with other sociocultural supports.Future STEM retention programs should consider integrating interventions that bolster students' spatial learning into programming aimed at mitigating the effects of sociocultural barriers.
Second, this research indicates that improving students' perspective-taking skills requires more focused intervention than solely engaging in geoscience coursework.We found that students' perspective-taking skills did not improve after completing five weeks of an introductory course.However, there is much evidence that spatial skills are malleable, and can be improved with training and practice (Uttal et al., 2013).Furthermore, strong spatial skills have been found to be fundamental to student STEM learning and progress in STEM domains at the novice level (e.g., Uttal & Cohen, 2012).Thus, integrating focused scaffolds and interventions aimed at improving students' perspective-taking skills into introductory and gateway geoscience coursework could benefit undergraduate students' STEM outcomes more broadly.

Conclusion
In conclusion, this study highlights the need to further understand the role of large-scale spatial skills, specifically perspective-taking skills, in students' geoscience learning and attainment at the undergraduate level.Furthermore, revealing a disparity in men and women's perspective-taking skills in introductory geoscience students, this study unveils an exigency for identifying how to best bolster and support the development of women's perspective-taking skills.Our findings indicate that women enrolling in introductory geoscience courses may have weaker perspective-taking skills than their peers who are men.Prior research suggests that large-scale spatial skills are associated with higher levels of educational achievement in the geoscience domain (Hegarty et al., 2010;Nazareth et al., 2019), and the underrepresentation of women continues to pose a challenge for undergraduate geoscience programs across the United States (National Science Foundation, 2022).While we did not find perspective-taking skills in introductory students to be associated with more conventional indicators of future success in STEM major programs (e.g., Chen & Soldner, 2013;Harris et al., 2020;Thompson & Bolin, 2011), addressing the gap between men and women's perspective-taking skills may have broader implications for the retention of women as they progress through the undergraduate geoscience major.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Box plots depicting the gender difference in perspective-taking skills at the beginning of the course.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Graph showing the change in perspective-taking skills by gender.the error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Table 1 .
Percent of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in 2017 in steM fields.

Table 3 .
Participants' reported first-generation student status and educational level.
Table 4 presents the descriptive statistics, skewness, kurtosis, and results from the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of normality for the VOV pretest, VOV posttest, undergraduate GPA, and midterm exam.Results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests revealed that the data do not follow a normal distribution.

Table 4 .
descriptive statistics for all measures.

Table 6 .
results of Mann-Whitney u-tests examining differences between men and women students.