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This research paper describes work performed at a large midwestern university in the U.S. examining the link between spatial skills and design performance. Spatial skills are vital to success in engineering education and their relation to efficient problem-solving is wellresearched. This study is part of a larger project focusing on understanding the link between spatial visualization skills and solving engineering design problems. In the current study, we made use of an eye-tracking device to determine the visual focus of participants while they solved an assigned design task. High and low spatial visualizers in undergraduate engineering were identified through Phase I testing. In Phase 1, students completed four widely accepted spatial ability tests. Subsequently, some students were invited to participate in a Phase 2 design problem-solving activity wearing the Tobii Pro Glasses 3 to collect eye tracking data to gain insight into the design problem-solving behaviors based on information collected about participants’ eye movement fixations (i.e. duration and location). In this paper, we report on the analysis conducted through Tobii Pro Lab research software involving 13 study participants of whom 7 (1 female, 6 male: 3 first-year, 4 senior-year) were high spatial visualizers while 6 (3 female, 3 male; 4 first-year, 2 senior-year) were low spatial visualizers. Findings from the study suggest that the solutions produced by the high visualizers were more graphical compared to low visualizers. Low visualizers focused more on the problem statement, spending more time reading it and coming back to it compared to high visualizers who remained in the problem solution area for most of the problem-solving session. Recognizing the importance of spatial abilities in design problem-solving, educators can incorporate activities and exercises aimed at developing spatial skills among students which could include spatial reasoning tasks, visualization exercises, and hands-on design projects. 

This study aims to investigate the development of creativity in engineering education and how spatial skills relate to creativity of design solutions. Undergraduate students in the first (n=86) and fourth/fifth year (n=48) of their engineering programme were invited to participate. Students completed four spatial tests to precisely measure visualisation skills. In a separate session, students were invited back to solve two engineering design tasks: a ping pong problem where they designed a ping pong ball launcher game to meet specified criteria and a rain catcher problem where they were tasked with developing as many ideas for capturing rainwater as a water source for a remote location as they could. Students were asked not to consider feasibility, cost, etc. and to come up multiple radical solutions to the rainwater capture problem. The creativity of design solutions was assessed using Adaptive Comparative Judgement. Statistical analysis indicated significant relationships between spatial skills, students’ year of study and gender. A statistically significant relationship was also found between students’ creativity scores on both design challenges. No statistical differences were determined in the creativity of first and fourth/fifth year students’ solutions. These findings will be discussed relative to existing research, future work, and potential implications for education practice. 

This research paper details a study investigating spatial visualization skills relation to design problem-solving for undergraduate engineering students. Design is outlined as one of the seven attributes that engineering students must demonstrate prior to their graduation as set out through the ABET guidelines. It is important to understand the factors that contribute to design capability to achieve this learning goal. Design problems by their nature are cognitive tasks and as such require problem solvers to draw both on learned knowledge and pertinent cognitive abilities for their solution. In the context of engineering design problem solving, spatial visualization is one such cognitive ability that likely plays a role. Previous research has demonstrated a link between spatial visualization and design. This work aims to advance on that research by exploring how spatial visualization relates to the design process enacted by undergraduate engineering students. There were two phases to data collection for this research. In the first phase, 127 undergraduate engineering students completed four spatial tests. In the second phase, 17 students returned to complete three design tasks. This paper will focus on one of these design tasks, the Ping Pong problem where individuals are asked to design a ping pong launcher to hit a target from a given distance at a specific height. A purposive sample of 9 first-year and 8 senior students were selected to engage in a think aloud protocol during the problemsolving task based on their spatial visualization skill levels (high vs. low). The think aloud protocol was used to assign pre-defined codes for design activity for each of the 17 participants. Through analysis of these codes, results indicated that there is an association between the spatial skills of students and the design processes/actions that they employ. These insights will be discussed relative to their potential influence on engineering education, specifically in developing design capability. 

This Complete Research paper investigates the holistic assessment of creativity in design solutions in engineering education. Design is a key element in contemporary engineering education, given the emphasis on its development through the ABET criteria. As such, design projects play a central role in many first-year engineering courses. Creativity is a vital component of design capability which can influence design performance; however, it is difficult to measure through traditional assessment rubrics and holistic assessment approaches may be more suitable to assess creativity of design solutions. One such holistic assessment approach is Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ). In this system, student designs are presented to judges in pairs, and they are asked to select the item of work that they deem to have demonstrated the greatest level of a specific criterion or set of criteria. Each judge is asked to make multiple judgements where the work they are presented with is adaptively paired in order to create a ranked order of all items in the sample. The use of this assessment approach in technology education has demonstrated high levels of reliability among judges (~0.9) irrespective of whether the judges are students or faculty. This research aimed to investigate the use of ACJ to holistically assess the creativity of first-year engineering students design solutions. The research also sought to explore the differences, if any, that would exist between the rank order produced by first-year engineering students and the faculty who regularly teach first-year students. Forty-six first-year engineering students and 23 faculty participated in this research. A separate ACJ session was carried out with each of these groups; however, both groups were asked to assess the same items of work. Participants were instructed to assess the creativity of 101 solutions to a design task, a “Ping Pong problem,” where undergraduate engineering students had been asked to design a ping pong ball launcher to meet specific criteria. In both ACJ sessions each item of work was included in at least 11 pairwise comparisons, with the maximum number of comparisons for a single item being 29 in the faculty ACJ session and 50 in the student ACJ session. The data from the ACJ sessions were analyzed to determine the reliability of using ACJ to assess creativity of design solutions in first-year engineering education, and to explore whether the rankings produced from the first-year engineering students ACJ session differed significantly from those of the faculty. The results indicate a reasonably high level of reliability in both sessions as measured by the Scale Separation Reliability (SSR) coefficient, SSRfaculty = 0.65 ± 0.02, SSRstudents = 0.71 ± 0.02. Further a strong correlation was observed between the ACJ ranks produced by the students and faculty both when considered in terms of the relative differences between items of work, r = .533, p < .001, and their absolute rank position, σ = .553, p < .001. These findings indicate that ACJ is a promising tool for holistically assessing design solutions in engineering education. Additionally, given the strong correlation between ranks of students and faculty, ACJ could be used to include students in their own assessment to reduce the faculty grading burden or to develop a shared construct of capability which could increase the alignment of teaching and learning.