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Context Engineering design skills are essential for engineering students to succeed in their careers. Engineering design is a skill that is in high demand in the current job market and should be prioritized in education. Purpose While design has been acknowledged as a cognitive skill in research, there exists limited literature addressing the cognitive foundations of design thinking. Hence, engineering educators must understand the engineering design process, as well as the different ways students approach design problem-solving and the potential reason behind these differences. To understand how people solve design problems, we need to consider how their minds work and the strategies they use. Spatial ability stands out as a cognitive factor that is crucial for designers and holds significance in well-established theories and models of intelligence. However, to date, research exploring the impact of spatial ability on design thinking and its influence on problem-scoping behaviors remains limited. This paper examines how engineering students’ spatial skills influence how they define the scope of open-ended design problems. The central research question that guides this paper is “How do design problem-scoping behaviors differ for engineering students based on their spatial scores?”. Methods The researchers used a mixed methods research approach to answer their research question, collecting qualitative and quantitative data in two phases. One hundred twenty-seven undergraduate engineering students completed four tests that measure spatial reasoning skills in the quantitative phase and 101 students returned to finish the three design tasks in the second phase. This paper will examine the performance of students with low spatial and high spatial skills on one of the completed design tasks. Outcomes From the study, it was clear that spatial skills have an impact on the design-scoping behaviors of the undergraduate engineering students. It was inferred that high spatial skill visualizers emphasized the technical details of the design problem whereas low spatial skill visualizers emphasized the context of the design problem during their problem-scoping behavior. A Mann-Whitney test revealed there was a statistically significant difference in detail- and context-focused segments between the high and low spatial visualizer groups. Conclusion This research study confirms that a relationship exists between spatial and design skills. The study also found that undergraduate engineering students with different levels of spatial skills had different approaches to scoping design problems.
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Prof
Spatial thinking skills are associated with performance, persistence, and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school subjects. Because STEM knowledge and skills are integral to developing a well-trained workforce within and beyond STEM, spatial skills have become a major focus of cognitive, developmental, and educational research. However, these efforts are greatly hampered by the current lack of access to reliable, valid, and well-normed spatial tests. Although there are hundreds of spatial tests, they are often hard to access and use, and information about their psychometric properties is frequently lacking. Additional problems include (1) substantial disagreement about what different spatial tests measure—even two tests with similar names may measure very different constructs; (2) the inability to measure some STEM-relevant spatial skills by any existing tests; and (3) many tests only being available for specific age groups. The first part of this report delineates these problems, as documented in a series of structured and open-ended interviews and surveys with colleagues. The second part outlines a roadmap for addressing the problems. We present possibilities for developing shared testing systems that would allow researchers to test many participants through the internet. We discuss technological innovations, such as virtual reality, which could facilitate the testing of navigation and other spatial skills. Developing a bank of testing resources will empower researchers and educators to explore and support spatial thinking in their disciplines, as well as drive the development of a comprehensive and coherent theoretical understanding of spatial thinking.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2135743
- PAR ID:
- 10612943
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Intelligence
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2079-3200
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 8
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- assessment and measurement psychometrics spatial cognition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Context Engineering design skills are essential for engineering students to succeed in their careers. Engineering design is a skill that is in high demand in the current job market and should be prioritized in education. Purpose While design has been acknowledged as a cognitive skill in research, there exists limited literature addressing the cognitive foundations of design thinking. Hence, engineering educators must understand the engineering design process, as well as the different ways students approach design problem-solving and the potential reason behind these differences. To understand how people solve design problems, we need to consider how their minds work and the strategies they use. Spatial ability stands out as a cognitive factor that is crucial for designers and holds significance in well-established theories and models of intelligence. However, to date, research exploring the impact of spatial ability on design thinking and its influence on problem-scoping behaviors remains limited. This paper examines how engineering students’ spatial skills influence how they define the scope of open-ended design problems. The central research question that guides this paper is “How do design problem-scoping behaviors differ for engineering students based on their spatial scores?”. Methods The researchers used a mixed methods research approach to answer their research question, collecting qualitative and quantitative data in two phases. One hundred twenty-seven undergraduate engineering students completed four tests that measure spatial reasoning skills in the quantitative phase and 101 students returned to finish the three design tasks in the second phase. This paper will examine the performance of students with low spatial and high spatial skills on one of the completed design tasks. Outcomes From the study, it was clear that spatial skills have an impact on the design-scoping behaviors of the undergraduate engineering students. It was inferred that high spatial skill visualizers emphasized the technical details of the design problem whereas low spatial skill visualizers emphasized the context of the design problem during their problem-scoping behavior. A Mann-Whitney test revealed there was a statistically significant difference in detail- and context-focused segments between the high and low spatial visualizer groups. Conclusion This research study confirms that a relationship exists between spatial and design skills. The study also found that undergraduate engineering students with different levels of spatial skills had different approaches to scoping design problems.more » « less
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There is a large gap between the ability of experts and students in grasping spatial concepts and representations. Engineering and the geosciences require the highest expertise in spatial thinking, and weak spatial skills are a significant barrier to success for many students [1]. Spatial skills are also highly malleable [2]; therefore, a current challenge is to identify how to promote students’ spatial thinking. Interdisciplinary research on how students think about spatially-demanding problems in the geosciences has identified several major barriers for students and interventions to help scaffold learning at a variety of levels from high school through upper level undergraduate majors. The Geoscience Education Transdisciplinary Spatial Learning Network (GET-Spatial; http://serc.carleton.edu/getspatial/) is an NSF-funded collaboration between geoscientists, cognitive psychologists, and education researchers. Our goal is to help students overcome initial hurdles in reasoning about spatial problems in an effort to diversify the geoscience workforce. Examples of spatial problems in the fields of geochemistry include scaling, both in size and time; penetrative thinking to make inferences about internal structures from surface properties; and graph-reading, especially ternary diagrams. Understanding scales outside of direct human experience, both very large (e.g. cosmochemistry, deep time) and very small (e.g. mineralogy, nanoparticles) can be acutely difficult for students. However, interventions have successfully resulted in improvements to scale estimations and improve exam performance [3]. We will discuss best practices for developing effective interdisciplinary teams, and how to overcome challenges of working across disciplines and across grade levels. We will provide examples of spatial interventions in scaling and penetrative thinking. [1] Hegarty et al. (2010) in Spatial Cognition VII 6222, 85- 94. [2] Uttal et al. (2012) Psychology of Learning and Motivation 57, 147-181. [3] Resnick et al. (2016) Educational Psychology Review, 1-15.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence12010008
