Examining the Link Between Spatial and Communication Skills among Engineering Students

该项目旨在通过探索工科专业学生的空间思维技能和交流技能之间的可能关系，包括在口头交流设计想法时使用手势，来服务于国家利益。总体而言，工科专业的学生往往具有很强的空间思维能力，但教育和行业领袖希望工科毕业生拥有更强的技术口头和书面沟通能力。在这种情况下，项目团队将调查可视化技能和沟通技能之间的关系。它将调查这样的问题：工程专业的高度可视化者是否难以将他们认为与生俱来的空间事物写成文字？本研究的结果将为工程教师和课程设计者以及工程教育研究者设计帮助工程专业学生加强技术交流技能的干预措施提供参考。具体地说，这项探索性研究将探索空间思维与技术写作/口语交流技能负相关的假设。该项目还将促进对空间技能水平和/或语言流畅性和手势产生之间的相互作用的了解。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语言类比测试。根据性别和空间测试分数，75名学生将被有目的地抽样，并被邀请进行第二次测试。第二节测试将包括语义和音素流畅性的测量，以及书面和口头交流技能任务，学生描述他们上个学期的设计项目产品。为了研究工科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，学生参与者的手势产生将展示空间思维在一个人的口头交流能力中发挥的作用程度。NSF IUSE：EDU计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生的STEM教育的有效性。通过其参与的学生学习跟踪，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NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.