Examining the Link Between Spatial and Communication Skills among Engineering Students

该项目旨在通过探索工程专业学生的空间思维能力与他们的沟通能力之间的可能关系，包括他们在口头表达设计想法时使用的手势，为国家利益服务。一般来说，工程专业的学生往往有很强的空间思维能力，但教育和行业领导者希望看到工程专业的毕业生有更强的技术口头和书面沟通能力。在此背景下，项目团队将调查可视化技能和沟通技能之间的关系。它将调查以下问题：擅长视觉化的工程专业学生是否很难将他们认为本质上是空间的东西用语言表达出来？研究结果将为工程教师和课程设计师以及工程教育研究人员提供信息，因为他们可以设计干预措施来帮助工程专业学生加强他们的技术沟通技能。具体而言，本探索性研究将探讨空间思维与技术写作/口头沟通能力呈负相关的假设。该项目还将促进对空间技能水平与/或语言流畅性和手势制作之间相互作用的理解。大约150名完成了第一学期工程设计项目的第二学期工程专业学生将完成两项空间认知测试和一项言语类比测试。将根据性别和空间测试分数有目的地抽取75名学生，并邀请他们参加第二轮测试。第二阶段的测试将包括对语义和音位流畅性的测量，以及书面和口头沟通技巧的测试，要求学生描述他们上学期的设计项目产品。为了研究工程专业学生对手势的使用，参与者将被要求描述包装礼物的过程。由于手势的使用已被证明与空间思维技能有关，学生参与者的手势制作将证明空间思维在一个人的口头交流能力中所起的作用。NSF IUSE: EDU项目支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过其参与学生学习轨道，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建，探索和实施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.