This paper reports on the impact that demographic characteristics have in the development of spatial visualization skills on two different offerings of CAD-related courses at two different institutions. The ultimate objective of this information is to identify factors that might be influencing visualization skills development. The importance placed on visualization skills improvement is due to the fact that they have been related to expected performance by students in the technical fields. The data for this study has been collected for a span of one year at two different institutions, with one institution offering a hybrid course including 2D and 3D topics, and the other institution offering a course with only 3D topics. The collected data includes several parameters, and in this study the focus will be on gender, race, previous CAD experience, and age. The measurement of the visualization skills is based on on the administration of the PSVT:R test at three different times during the semester: at the start, in the middle, and at the end. Previous comparative studies have resulted in no statistically significant differences between the two course offerings. Results from this study indicate that CAD experience and age play a more direct role in positively affecting the visualization skills of students.
Integrating CSCL activities is something that has been widely discussed in the CSCL community but as yet only implemented in a reduced set of domain specific tools. In this paper we propose the integration of a set of default and authoring CSCL tools into a standard LMS, as a complete sequence of learning activities based on a constructivist approach. An experiment was also carried out in order to verify the usability and extent of the collaborative work in a real context.Based on results of evaluation, we conclude that the integration of chat was a useful addition to the concept map building tool. This highlighted the professor role as a moderator entity maintaining a central role during the learning experience. The tests were carried out in presence of professors who felt that software would be useful to promote the participation of students and facilitate continuous assessment for this courses and other courses.
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