Relating Spatial Skills and Expression Evaluation

Work connecting spatial skills to computing has used course grades or marks, or general programming tests as the measure of computing ability. In order to map the relationship between spatial skills and computing more precisely, this paper picks out a particular subset of possible programming concepts and skills, that of expression evaluation. The paper describes the development of an expression evaluation test, which aims to identify participants’ ability to perform evaluations of expressions across a range of complexity. The results indicate participants’ expression evaluation ability was significantly correlated with a spatial skills test (r=0.48), even more so when only considering those with less prior programming experience (r=0.58). Thus, we have determined that spatial skills are of value in expression evaluation exercises, particularly for beginners.