Attitudes towards sketching and drawing and the relationship with spatial visualisation ability in engineering students

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitude of engineering students towards sketching and drawing (S&D) and its relationship with spatial visualisation ability. Three aspects of attitude towards S&D were investigated namely, (a) the view of the professional role of S&D, (b) the personal value of S&D and (c) the usage tendency of S&D. Comparison was made between engineering and architecture students with respect to their attitude towards S&D. The engineering and architecture sample sizes were 57 and 19 respectively. Correlational research design was used to study the association between attitude and spatial visualisation ability. It was found that the mean scores of the engineering students’ were statistically less significant on all attitude aspects when compared to that of the architecture students’ and that there were statistically significant correlations between usage tendency of S&D and spatial visualisation ability. It was therefore concluded that engineering students had poorer attitude towards S&D compared to architecture students and that there was an association between the usage tendency aspect of attitude towards S&D with spatial visualisation ability