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Session 1793

Visual-Spatial Ability in First-Year Engineering Students: A Useful Retention Variable? Chris Brus, Lili Zhao, and Julie Jessop University of Iowa

Background and Significance

A longstanding and robust performance gap on tests of visual-spatial ability has been well documented in the cognitive psychology literature, with women, in general, having less well- developed skills, especially on tasks of mental rotation.1,2,3 Visual-spatial ability, also called spatial visualization, is defined by McGee as the ability to mentally rotate, twist, or invert pictorially presented visual stimuli.4 The ability to discern relationships between shapes and objects has also been found to be an important factor for, if not predictive of, success in disciplines that involve the manipulation of objects in spatial environments such as engineering, chemistry, and computer science.5,6,7 According to Cooper and Mumaw,8 the spatial aptitude literature is quite clear in showing that a broadly defined spatial factor exists independently of verbal and quantitative factors and that this spatial factor is more effective than other measures of intelligence in predicting success in certain academic and industrial areas.

The debate surrounding the underlying reasons for this gap is rigorous and ongoing, generally revolving around the implications of a biologically-based phenomenon (nature) vs. a psychosocial one (nurture). This debate is not unimportant. Researchers who believe that differences in cognition are primarily biologically-based9,10,11 also tend to believe that much of the differential we see in societal outcomes can only be somewhat moderated by intervention. This argument may seem especially relevant for visual-spatial ability. While there is evidence that the gender gap in verbal and computational ability has been decreasing over time,12 it has been more difficult to document any significant narrowing of the gender gap in visual-spatial ability.

Researchers on the other side of the debate place responsibility for sex differences in cognition squarely in the nurture camp, emphasizing the role of differential experience as a critical variable in an individual’s facility with spatial visualization tasks.13 Secondarily, and most importantly for those of us involved in developing curricular interventions to increase the retention of women in the engineering pipeline, there is ample evidence that performance on visual-spatial tests, such as the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualization of Rotations (PVST:R),14 can be greatly enhanced by training.15,16,17,18

With the ever increasing utilization of computer graphics programs, such as CAD, in the undergraduate engineering curriculum, it is critical that the reported gender gap in visual-spatial ability be further characterized to understand its effect on the undergraduate engineering population.19,20 In particular, we are interested in whether differential skill levels of visual-spatial ability exert enough pressure on young women in undergraduate engineering programs to be a factor in their rates of attrition, which are significantly higher than their male counterparts.21

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Zhao, L., & Brus, C., & Jessop, J. (2004, June), Visual Spatial Ability In First Year Engineering Students: A Useful Retention Variable? Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13248