Impact Of Spatial Visualization Topic Order On Student Performance And Attitudes

Spatial visualization skills are critical to many scientific and technical careers. At Michigan Tech, we identify first year engineering students who may not have fully developed their spatial skills and invite them to take an optional 1-credit course to help develop these skills. This class meets for 1.5 hours once a week for 14 weeks. The topics covered in this class include: isometric drawing, orthographic projections, flat patterns, 3-D rotations, object reflections and planes of symmetry, cutting planes, surfaces and solids of revolution, and combining solids. Topics are listed in the order that was thought to develop 3-D spatial skills and in the order they have been traditionally covered in this class. In the past we have noticed that 1) some students have a difficult time jumping right into isometric sketching and 2) that by the end of the semester students seem bored, especially when coving the topics of surfaces and solids of revolution and combining solids. To determine if attitudes and learning at the beginning and end of the course could be improved, the order of topics covered was altered in one of the three sections of the spatial visualization course during the Fall 2007 semester. At the same time, we wanted to ensure that changing the order in which topics were covered did not negatively impact improvements in spatial skills that we have been able to achieve through this course. Therefore, students in all sections were preand post-tested to determine whether changing the order of topics had a negative impact on spatial skill development. Attitudes of students taking the course with the traditional order of topics were compared to attitudes of students taking the course with the modified order through weekly evaluation forms. The evaluation form asked students to rate things such as their perception of the difficulty of the topic, how much time they spent on the material outside of class, and their enjoyment of the material covered. It was found that the new order of course material did not have an impact on the development of spatial skills or student perception of the difficulty of the material. However, students did show a slight improvement in their overall enjoyment of the material. This improvement was statistically significant for the module on combining solids which was moved to the beginning of the semester. The improvement in enjoyment was also significant for some of the more difficult modules, inclined and curved surfaces and rotations about a single axis.