EXPERIENCE FIRSTHAND

Spatial Activity: Making 3-D Inferences
	In this example, the figure has been made intentionally ambiguous. It could be interpreted as either a cube or a pyramid, and either of the figures you had to choose from might result when the plane intersects it. (And either result might be considered wrong, depending on how the teacher or test developer interpreted the figure.) The confusion you may have felt trying to answer this problem is similar to what a child who has difficulties making visual and spatial inferences might encounter. Imagine if the entire lesson or, in the case of geometry, the entire course depended on your ability to understand figures of this kind. Problems like this are a mandatory part of the mathematics curriculum in many school districts and appear on high-stakes standardized tests. Even someone fluent in math might have found this problem tricky. What would it have been like if you could not begin to visualize a cube or a pyramid?
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