Spatial Skills Training Impacts Retention of Engineering Students - Does This Success Translate to Community College Students in Technical Education?

Metz, Susan Staffin; Sorby, Sheryl A.; Jarosewich, Tania

doi:10.18260/p.25853

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Multiple schools across the country are Page 26.1389.3 a part of Engage (Engaging Students in Engineering), which works to increasing the retention rate of engineering majors [35,36]. These schools typically offer freshman spatial courses that can be as simple and low cost as drafting or as highly refined 3-D CAD work.…”

Section: Recommendations For Enhancing Spatial Skills (Engineering Scmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One important note to make is that before working on enhancing an individual's spatial skills, they must understand that spatial skill ability is not inherent but learned. This is a crucial thing to understand, because students that struggle with spatial thinking but may otherwise be academically flawless may still feel compelled to quit engineering because of a self-perceived lack of competence [35,47,15,23,32,48,16,34].…”

Section: Recommendations For Enhancing Spatial Skills (Practitioners)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatial Skills Development of Engineering Students: Identifying Instructional Tools to Incorporate into Existing Curricula

Bairaktarova¹,

Reyes²,

Nassr³

et al.

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

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Section: Recommendations For Enhancing Spatial Skills (Engineering Scmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Recommendations For Enhancing Spatial Skills (Practitioners)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Skills Development of Engineering Students: Identifying Instructional Tools to Incorporate into Existing Curricula

Bairaktarova¹,

Reyes²,

Nassr³

et al.

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

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“…28,29,30,31,32 This study approaches the topic from a slightly different angle. In order to design and develop an instructional intervention, the authors first focused on the early life experiences and motivational factors that may play a role in individuals' spatial skills.…”

Section: Purpose Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Student Spatial Skills: Using Life Experiences and Motivational Factors to Inform Instructional Interventions

Reyes¹,

Bairaktarova²,

Woodcock³

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Anna Woodcock is a social psychologist and faculty member at California State University San Marcos. She is currently investigating the contextual factors that promote and reinforce social disparities such as the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM. Specifically: individual differences in motivations to pursue STEM careers; the psychological processes underlying the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM; and effective interventions for diversifying STEM.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Improving Student Spatial Skills: Using Life Experiences and Motivational Factors to Inform Instructional InterventionsSpatial thinking refers to the ability to create and hold an object in the mind's eye and manipulate that object via sectional cuts, three dimensional rotations, and other mental operations. Prior research suggests that the degree to which students differ in their development of spatial skills affects their performance on instructional tasks that require spatial visualization. This study builds on prior efforts to identify how individuals' beliefs and experiences influence spatial skills. A revised instrument was developed and allows for the analysis of the interaction between early life experiences, motivation, and spatial skills. Based on a factor analysis, these life experiences are grouped into factors that are then analyzed for correlation with spatial skills. Results indicate a positive correlation between early life experiences in designing and building things and high spatial skills. Results also indicate those that believe knowledge is fixed tend to have lower spatial skills. This effect is mediated by individuals' self-efficacy beliefs.

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“…Grimes and Daniel report success at improving spatial visualization ability of community college students by employing training materials developed by Sorby in a required orientation course [18]. Preliminary results of a large, multi-institution NSF-funded deployment of spatial-skills training (Spatial Skills Instruction Impacts Technology Students, or SKIITS) indicate that such training improves spatial skills and course grades of community college students [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Students completed the 3DM-SES[19], a short survey with the following questions Question Question text 1 I feel that I am good at visualizing and manipulating 3-D objects in space.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering Graphics in a Community College Setting: Challenges and Opportunities

Budinoff

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

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This evidence-based practice paper describes a study of the efficacy of several engineering education pedagogy practices in an engineering graphics course at a large community college in the southwestern US. The student population at community colleges is typically diverse and has a larger proportion of non-traditional students relative to four-year institutions. Most studies of engineering graphics research are conducted at four-year institutions, but results derived from the more diverse student populations at community colleges could help develop more general strategies to improve retention of underrepresented groups in engineering. In this paper, we survey some of the unique demographic and social challenges of community college students and assess the following pedagogical strategies derived from previous literature: lab activities, active learning, and improving spatial visualization ability. Lab activities and content that encourage active learning have been previously cited as effective strategies for engaging nontraditional students. Spatial visualization ability has been shown to impact learning outcomes in engineering graphics courses, and activities like sketching have been shown to help students with low spatial visualization. This study focuses on an introductory engineering graphics course that teaches modeling and assembly and drawing creation in SolidWorks, a 3D computer-aideddesign software. We discuss the impact of lab time, active learning activities, and sketching activities on student's self-efficacy and perceived learning, as well as connections between spatial visualization ability and learning outcomes. Students reported a large increase in their 3Dmodeling self-efficacy over the semester and agreed that working on CAD during lab time and following along with instructor demos were helpful to their learning. In an attempt to improve spatial visualization ability of the students, sketching components were included during the course. The average spatial visualization skills of the students improved over the semester, but students had mixed agreement about whether the sketching activities were helpful for learning course material. Our results are compared to previously reported findings from four-year institutions and other community colleges, when available. We highlight promising strategies to promote learning and confidence for diverse student populations learning engineering graphics, which could potentially improve retention at other community colleges and four-year institutions.

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Spatial Skills Training Impacts Retention of Engineering Students - Does This Success Translate to Community College Students in Technical Education?

Cited by 8 publications

References 17 publications

Spatial Skills Development of Engineering Students: Identifying Instructional Tools to Incorporate into Existing Curricula

Spatial Skills Development of Engineering Students: Identifying Instructional Tools to Incorporate into Existing Curricula

Improving Student Spatial Skills: Using Life Experiences and Motivational Factors to Inform Instructional Interventions

Engineering Graphics in a Community College Setting: Challenges and Opportunities

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