2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this research paper, we discuss the Sophomore Fast-Forward Program, a summer bridge program designed for students who have unmet summer financial need. The program’s primary purpose is to retain students in engineering majors, thus increasing the number of engineers in the workforce. Students in the program take three courses before the beginning of their second year. One of these three courses is the Professional Planning with Spatial Visualization course which implements the Sorby’s Developing Spatial Thinking curriculum. This paper addresses the question: What are the effects of the spatial thinking curriculum on the spatial abilities of low-income sophomore summer scholars?
Students take the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT:R) and the Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board Test (RMPFBT) as a pre- and post-assessment for this program. The PSVT:R is traditionally administered as a pre/post assessment of spatial visualization in engineering majors. In this work, it was chosen to assess knowledge gains because Sorby’s curriculum includes a strong focus on rotations. The RMPFBT was included as a pre/post assessment because it is a well-established, validated instrument for spatial visualization, and it includes two versions, thus allowing us to control for memory effects.
We compared both tests matched pre-data and post-data to investigate if the implementation of this curriculum improved student’s spatial visualization skills. Suitable statistical tests were performed to analyze the data from all six summers. While the students completed the PSVT:R during every implementation of the Sophomore Fast-Forward Program, they did not take the RMPFBT during 2017 (first year of program) or in 2020 (COVID-19 year, virtual program and RMPFBT is a physical assessment). Analysis of RMPFBT instead includes data from four summers.
We found that the PSVT:R scores showed significant improvement with moderate effect sizes. The PSVT:R also showed a significant gender effect with males scoring higher than females. No effects by program year were present. RMPFBT scores showed an overall improvement with no gender effects, although pairwise analysis showed the improvement was concentrated in the 2021 cohort. We conclude that the curriculum is beneficial to include in engineering programs to help students with their three-dimensional spatial ability skills and may additionally benefit two-dimensional spatial ability skills.

Keywords: Spatial Ability, Visualization, PSVT:R, RMPFBT