Examining the Link Between Spatial and Communication Skills among Engineering Students

This project aims to serve the national interest by exploring possible relationships between engineering majors’ spatial thinking skills and their communication skills, including their use of gestures when verbally communicating their design ideas. In general, engineering majors tend to have strong spatial thinking skills but education and industry leaders would like to see stronger technical verbal and written communication skills among engineering graduates. Given this context the project team will investigate the relationship between visualization skills and communications skills. It will investigate questions such as: Do engineering majors who are high visualizers struggle to put into words things they think are inherently spatial? Results from the research will be informative to engineering instructors and curriculum designers, as well as to engineering education researchers, as they design interventions to help engineering majors strengthen their technical communication skills. Specifically, this exploratory research will investigate the hypothesis that spatial thinking and technical writing/oral communication skills are inversely correlated. The project will also advance understanding about the interaction between spatial skill levels and/or verbal fluency and gesture production. Approximately 150 second-semester engineering majors who completed a first-semester engineering design project will complete two tests of spatial cognition and a verbal analogy measure. Seventy-five students will be purposefully sampled based on gender and spatial test scores and invited for a second session of testing. The second session of testing will include measures of semantic and phonemic fluency as well as written and oral communication skills tasks where students describe their design project products from the previous semester. To study engineering majors’ use of gesturing, participants will be asked to describe the process used to wrap a present. Since the use of gestures has been shown to be related to spatial thinking skills, gesture production among student participants will demonstrate the extent to which spatial thinking plays in a person’s ability to communicate verbally. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.