The Effect of Engineering Education, on Spatial Ability, in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Since spatial skills are important in the modern world, tests that can improve them are included in the curriculum of engineering studies. In this article, the results of a pre-test and a post-test are presented, which were performed in the herein developed, virtual environment. The former was conducted in the beginning, while the latter was done at end of semester 2019/2020/1, with 240 engineering students. The spatial skills of students were measured on these tests using the Mental Rotation Test (MRT), Mental Cutting Test (MCT), and the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test (PSVT). Between the pre- test and post-test, spatial ability enhancing courses were attended by the students. The results show that their performance in the post-test, notably improved – albeit slightly. This improvement differs between various user groups and test types: regarding the students, 1st-year, right-handed or those who were at most 18 years old improved significantly, between the two tests; regarding the test types, significant improvement only occurred during the two MRT tests. While no such difference was detected on the pre-test, civil engineering students significantly outperformed mechanical engineering students in the post-test, while males who scored at least 50 points on the post-test, performed significantly better than females on the pre-test.