2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

[Blinded University] administers the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) to incoming First-Year engineering students at orientation. Students who score less than 60 percent on the PSVT:R are required to take a spatial visualization skills intervention course, ENG1002 Intro to Spatial Visualization . In the fall semester of 2022, approximately 15 percent of students enrolled in the First-Year Engineering Program were also required to enroll in ENG1002. This resulted in five class offerings of ENG1002 with approximately 30 students per class.

Questions exist as to why engineering students who complete Intro to Spatial Visualization at [Blinded University] attain higher average grades in their other courses, such as Calculus I and II, and Chemistry, and why the retention rate, especially of women, is higher for students who have taken Intro to Spatial Visualization. One possible explanation is related to students’ feelings about and confidence in their abilities to gain the skills they know to be important to engineers and attain their goals (self-efficacy) of becoming an engineer after overcoming the obstacle of failing an assessment of 3-D spatial visualization skills administered at the onset of their engineering program. Researchers believe self-efficacy is related to academic performance and retention, leading to the completion of a degree. As Bandura (1997) contended, “unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act.” There are experiences and activities that increase self-efficacy of undergraduate engineering students, as found by Usher et. al (2015). Interestingly, these are all outlined in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (1999), including positive feedback on skill development, receiving positive affirmations from trusted others, viewing others working in careers of interest, and experiencing the work they are interested in themselves. Usher, Mamaril, Lee, Economy, and Kennedy (2015) studied the effects of each of these experiences and found them all to increase self-efficacy in engineering skills. Furthermore, researchers have identified spatial ability as important for engineering modeling and design(Sorby, 1999). This systematic literature review examines the relationship between spatial abilities and self-efficacy in engineering.