Developing spatial cognitive skills among middle school students

Abstract

In 1992, an initial grant was awarded from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US and a course was developed and implemented at Michigan Tech to help firstyear engineering students to develop their 3-D spatial skills. The course syllabus was created with topics sequenced in a fashion known to enhance spatial skills. A textbook (Baartmans and Sorby 1995) was written in support of the class outline. Computer exercises that utilized computer-aided design software were developed as a part of this initial grant activity with exercises designed to reinforce topics from class lectures (Sorby and Baartmans 2000). During freshman orientation in 1993, students who had declared majors of mechanical, civil, environmental, metallurgical, or general engineering were administered the PSVT:R (Guay 1977). In this initial year, a total of 96 out of 535 students failed the PSVT:R with a score of less than 60%. A random sample of 24 students who failed the PSVT:R was selected for participation in the experimental course and the remaining 72 students became the comparison group for the initial study. In examining the results from the PSVT:R for this initial group of students, the following observations were made. Although women made up only about 17% of the group taking the PSVT:R, they were about 43% of the group failing the test, making women nearly three times as likely to fail the PSVT:R than their male counterparts. Furthermore, of the 45 students who received perfect scores, only three were women. Male–female differences in failure and perfect score rates were statistically significant (P\ 0.01). In January 1998, a new grant was awarded from the NSF to replace the computer exercises that were developed as part of the initial funding (that were based on CAD software) with stand-alone multimedia software modules. Along with this software, a workbook was developed with sketching problems similar to those found to be helpful in helping students to develop their spatial skills. The result is a set of materials that was published by Cengage Learning in July 2002. The software modules, included as a CDROM in the back of the workbook, are stand alone and work with either a Mac or a PC. The software and workbook have been rigorously assessed to determine their effectiveness in improving spatial skills and to determine their usability from both a student’s and faculty member’s perspective. Through this evaluation, the effectiveness of the materials has been demonstrated for the use with firstyear engineering students (Gerson et al. 2001). Other findings from longitudinal studies conducted with engineering students are: (1) students with weak spatial skills who participated in the spatial skills training course earned better grades in a variety of follow-on engineering, science, and mathematics courses when contrasted with a similarly chosen comparison group and (2) women with weak spatial skills who participated in the spatial skills training course were more likely to be retained at the university when contrasted with women in a similarly chosen comparison group (Sorby 2001).