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Students’ engagement with geographic information systems (GIS) can improve spatial skills, which are predictors of STEM success (Jant et al., 2019). We used a survey motivated by Eccles’s (2009) expectancy-value-cost framework to assess students’ perceptions of their computer science (CS) courses before and after participation in a GIS unit. The unit provided opportunities to apply GIS to inquiry-based projects focused on solving problems in their own communities. Across four teachers, 158 students participated in the GIS unit and completed the survey. We found that students’ reports of classroom equity predicted their expectancy for success in CS and their desire to take additional CS courses or major in CS. We also examined students’ performance on a geospatial problem-solving assessment to investigate their understanding of GIS and their spatial reasoning.
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A CS1 Spatial Skills Intervention and the Impact on Introductory Programming Abilities
This paper discusses the results of replicating and extending a study performed by Cooper et al. examining the relationship between students’ spatial skills and their success in learning to program. Whereas Cooper et al. worked with high school students participating in a summer program, we worked with college students taking an introductory computing course. Like Cooper et al.’s study, we saw a correlation between a student’s spatial skills and their success in learning computing. More significantly, we saw that after applying an intervention to teach spatial skills, students demonstrated improved performance both on a standard spatial skills assessment as well as on a CS content instrument. We also saw a correlation between students’ enjoyment in computing and improved performance both on a standard spatial skills assessment and on a CS content instrument, a result not observed by Cooper et al.
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- PAR ID:
- 10204111
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE 2020
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 766 to 772
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366829
