2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

ABET requires that all engineering graduates are able to effectively communicate technical information; however, industry leaders often lament the technical communication skills of our undergraduate engineering students. Despite years of concerted effort, at a national level, the situation does not appear to be improving. In contrast, the spatial skills of engineering students are typically well above average. A significant body of research has demonstrated the link between high spatial skills and success in engineering overall. Is there a link between high spatial skills and low technical communication skills for some of our students? In other words, are the high spatial skills of our students negatively correlated with their technical communication skills? This paper reports on a portion of a larger study examining the relationship between technical communication and spatial skills. Data for this study was collected from 90 first-year engineering students at a large midwestern university. Students were administered two tests of spatial ability and completed phonemic and semantic fluency tasks individually while being video recorded. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between spatial skills and two types of fluency— phonemic and semantic. Phonemic fluency is defined as how well you can put words together to form a cohesive sentence or paragraph; semantic fluency is related to the size of your vocabulary. Previous studies have shown that individuals with high levels of spatial skills typically have low levels of phonemic fluency. Both types of fluency likely influence a person’s ability to effectively communicate technical information. Implications for engineering education based on our findings will be discussed in the paper.