The Role of Spatial Ability on Architecture Education

Spatial ability is one of the most important key points for technical professions such as architects and engineers and is directly related with the success in educational and professional business life. In this regard, “Techniques of Architectural Presentation”, a first semester architectural department course at Gebze Technical University, aims to provide these skills through a variety of techniques such as two-dimensional, three-dimensional representations and models. In this study, the contribution of this course on spatial skills were researched considering students' spatial experiences and innate abilities before architectural education. Pre-test and post-test research were applied and analysed with Statistical Packages for Social Science (SPSS) version 18 software. The pre-test and post-test results have concluded that significant progression was seen between spatial visualisation-spatial perception and spatial orientation tests, while no significant progression was seen between mental rotation and spatial relation- mental rotation tests. The evaluation of the data indicates that the mentioned course is highly effective in the development of spatial skills in total and in the context of spatial visualisation and spatial orientation and the skills can be enhanced by training. Therefore, the syllabus of the course needs to be improved in terms of mental rotation and spatial relation