Impact of spatial ability on students doing graphics based courses

The ability to design involves ideation followed by the ability to document the outcomes of that ideation process in a logical and accepted form. This documentation is most commonly done in CAD, traditionally by technical drawing. Because of the need to be able to employ graphic forms of documentation many Engineering Programs have as one of their early subjects drawing or CAD, or a subject that integrates these. Current students enrolling in Engineering Programs generally do not have extensive skills or experiences in graphics especially technical drawing and CAD. This paper reports on research conducted in the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle that examined performance of participants on a range of spatial cognition tasks. The tasks were chosen because of their relevance to engineering students who enrol in introductory graphics-based courses. Results indicate that tasks requiring advanced spatial ability associated with coordinate systems were found to be difficult. Other tasks requiring spatial reasoning to identify three-dimensional properties from orthographic drawing produced results better than expected. Participants were university students without prior learning experience in any form of technical drawing. Results of the study are examined and specific outcomes are highlighted. The paper also provides evidence of the role that active exploration and computerbased training can play in developing spatial ability using realistic computergenerated three-dimensional models. Spatial ability as a predictor of success in graphics-based courses is discussed and gender bias in favour of males is raised. Current development of purpose-designed learning tasks to improve 3D understanding is also reported. Implications for teaching of graphics-based courses from this research and from results of previous research are explained