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ABET requires that all engineering graduates are able to effectively communicate technical information; however, industry leaders often lament the technical communication skills of our engineering student graduates. Despite years of concerted effort, at a national level, the situation does not appear to be improving. In contrast, the spatial skills of engineering students are typically well above average. A significant body of research has demonstrated the link between high spatial skills and success in engineering overall. But is there a link between high spatial skills and low technical communication skills for some of our students? In other words, are the high spatial skills of engineering students negatively correlated with their technical communication skills? This paper reports on a portion of a larger study examining the relationship between technical communication and spatial skills. Data for this study was collected from 90 first-year engineering students at a large midwestern university. Students were administered two tests of spatial ability and completed phonemic and semantic fluency tasks individually while being video recorded. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between spatial skills and these two types of fluency— phonemic and semantic. Phonemic fluency is defined as how well you can put words together to form a cohesive sentence or paragraph; semantic fluency is related to the size of your vocabulary. Both types of fluency likely influence a person’s ability to effectively communicate technical information. Preliminary findings suggest a weakly positive link between spatial skills and both types of fluency, which prompts further investigation into how technical communication abilities are evaluated and informs future research in the area. Implications for engineering education based on our findings are discussed in the paper. 

Industry leaders rarely remark that the technical skills of engineering students are lacking; however, they frequently indicate that new engineers should be better prepared in communication skills, particularly written communication skills. In contrast, the visualization ability, or spatial skills, of engineering majors are typically excellent. Prior research has demonstrated that spatial ability is a significant predictor for graduating from STEM fields, particularly in engineering. This paper is part of a larger project that is exploring whether these two phenomena – poor written communication skills and well-developed spatial skills – are linked. In other words, is there a negative correlation between these two types of skills for engineering students? Data for this study was collected from first-year engineering students at a large university in the U.S. An online survey was administered that consisted of two validated spatial visualization tests, a verbal analogy task, and questions regarding students’ self-perceived communication ability. Student scores on spatial visualization tests and a verbal analogy task were compared between student groups and students’ perceived ability to communicate. Results identified statistically significant differences in test scores between domestic and international male students on all three tests. Interestingly, no gender-based differences were observed in spatial skills. Results from this study will contribute to future exploration of the link between spatial and technical communication skills. Results can also help inform the development of an intervention aimed at improving the written technical communication skills of our engineering students by helping them learn to write about spatial phenomena.