Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 85 p. : ill. (some col.), col. map. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-81).

Understanding student achievement in science is important as there is an increasing reliance of the U.S. economy on math, science, and technology-related fields despite the declining number of youth seeking college degrees and careers in math and science. A series of structural equation models were tested using the scores from a statewide science exam for 276 students from a suburban north Texas public school district at the end of their 5th grade year and the latent variables of spatial ability, motivation to learn science and science-related attitude. Spatial ability was tested as a mediating variable on motivation and attitude; however, while spatial ability had statistically significant regression coefficients with motivation and attitude, spatial ability was found to be the sole statistically significant predictor of science achievement for these students explaining 23.1% of the variance in science scores.

This research aims to investigate whether expertise, specifically martial arts expertise, is transferrable across domains, which would indicate spatial skills in one task can also apply to a seemingly unrelated one. In this study, reaction time during a mental rotation task was compared between experts and novices. Participants were shown two images and had to decide if the images were the same or mirror reflections. The images were comprised of Shepard-Metzler blocks, people in martial arts poses, and people in neutral poses. The results suggest expertise is not transferable across domains. While experts outperformed novices with some of the martial arts stimuli, there was not a significant difference with the neutral poses. Novices performed better than experts with the Shepard-Metzler blocks. This suggests experts may have embodied some of the stimuli to facilitate faster reaction times. Further research must be conducted to investigate if any type of expertise is transferable across domains, which could assist in the development of employee training programs, and to validate the human figures used as stimuli.

Several experiments are presented to evaluate the development of visuo-spatial short term memory from childhood to old age (from five-year-olds to about 70-year-olds). Visuospatial short term memory was assessed through transformational imagery tasks. The first set of experiments (chapters 3, 4 and 5) concerned the development of mental rotation abilities. A review of the literature suggested that young children (specifically so-called preoperational children) and elderly people are poor at rotating a mental image of a visual pattern. However, as some mental rotation abilities have been reported while using Shepard's paradigm, attention was focussed on the role of the first steps necessarily taken while performing a mental rotation task, specifically the maintenance of a visual pattern in STM. The second set of experiments (chapter 6) considered another imagery subsystem, namely "mental scanning". Like mental rotation, it requires the maintenance of a visual pattern in short term memory. Image maintenance ability has been assessed in reference to Kosslyn's (1994) model although Baddeley's (1986) working memory model- specifically, Logie's (1995) revision of the VSSP - has been sometimes considered while interpreting the data. These two different theoretical models suggest the existence of two related but different subsystems for sorting visual and spatial information. Most of the data presented in this thesis suggest that young children and the elderly have some difficulties maintaining spatial characteristics of a visual pattern in short term memory, i.e. the orientation of the stimulus in the mental rotation tasks and the location of targets in the mental scanning tasks. These results tend to provide some developmental evidence for a dissociation between the dorsal and ventral subsystems. It seems that the two subsystems develop at different speeds. The ventral subsystem might be better developed earlier than the dorsal subsystem. Similarly, some data suggest that the same ventral system is not yet affected by ageing when the dorsal subsystem has already begun to deteriorate.

Maternal physiology and behavior change dramatically over the course of pregnancy to nurture the fetus and prepare for motherhood. Further, the experience of motherhood itself continues to influence brain functioning well after birth, shaping behavior to promote the survival of offspring. To meet these goals, cognitive abilities, such as spatial memory and navigation, may be enhanced to facilitate foraging. Existing studies on pregnant and maternal rats demonstrate enhanced cognitive function in specific spatial domains. However, in humans, anecdotal reports abound regarding impaired cognition during pregnancy, colloquially termed baby brain. Epidemiological studies indicate that 50 to 80 percent of pregnant women report problems with thinking and/or with memory. When tested objectively, the most consistent finding indicates impaired verbal memory. However, no studies to date have focused specifically on the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on human spatial cognition. We used analogous tests of spatial memory and navigation at matched phases of reproduction to study changes in spatial memory across pregnancy and motherhood in both rats and humans. Parallel studies with closely matched paradigms allowed us to better understand evolutionary conservation of the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on spatial abilities, while contributing to our knowledge of each species individually. Results indicated a persistent advantage in object-in-place memory of primiparous female rats that emerged during lactation not during pregnancy, and was not related to non-mnemonic factors of anxiety or neophobia. On a modified water maze task to assess learning strategy, both primiparous and nulliparous females learned the task at similar rates and accuracies, but neither group demonstrated a preference for place strategy or stimulus-response strategy. In humans, pregnant and lactating women were not objectively impaired compared to women who had never been pregnant when tested on several measures of spatial performance to assess object-in-place memory and spatial navigation. Despite objectively equivalent performance, both pregnant and lactating women subjectively rated themselves as more impaired on spatial tasks than never-pregnant women. Disparate results on the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on cognitive function in rats and humans calls into question the fitness of the rat model as applied to human cognition. / acase@tulane.edu

Distance education is growing at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Engineering graphics laboratory courses are unique in their focus on skills and design with an emphasis on a hands-on approach when compared to many subjects that focus on mastering information. Most studies in the literature focus on how distance learning has impacted traditionally lecture-based curricular approach and not on classrooms that are traditionally laboratory based as would be typically found in many engineering graphics courses. This study measured and compared spatial ability as it is an essential component to engineering graphics, and has a highly correlated measure of success in engineering and other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. This study’s purpose was to measure and compare a face-to-face engineering graphics course with a synchronous distance education engineering graphics course by identifying the impact of the teacher’s physical presence on students’ spatial ability. The differences found in the change of spatial ability between students taking an engineering graphics course by means of synchronous distance education and face-to-face courses were found in students with a low beginning spatial ability. Students with a low beginning spatial ability showed greater improvement in spatial ability in the face-to-face courses (m = 3.50, SD = 1.93), than in the synchronous distance education courses (m = 1.39, SD = 2.25).

Virtual reality-based instruction such as virtual worlds, games, and simulations are becoming very popular in K-12 and higher education. Three manuscripts that report the results of investigations of these increasingly prevalent instructional media were developed for this dissertation. The purpose of the first study, a meta-analysis, was to analyze the instructional effectiveness of virtual reality-based instruction when compared to the traditional methods of instruction. In addition, this study also explored selected instructional design features of the virtual learning environment that moderated the relationship between instructional method and the academic achievements. Analyses of 63 experimental or quasi-experimental studies that studied learning outcomes of virtual reality-based instruction in K-12 or higher education settings yielded a mean effect size of g = 0.47 (SE = 0.02) suggesting that virtual reality-based instruction is an effective medium of delivering instruction. Further analyses examined factors that influence its effectiveness. The purpose of the second study was to examine a model of the impact of a 3-D desktop virtual reality environment on the learner characteristics (i.e. perceptual and psychological variables) that can enhance chemistry-related learning achievements in an introductory college chemistry class. A theoretical model of the relationships of features of 3-D virtual reality environments and students' experiences in the environments to outcomes on a chemistry learning test and measures of spatial ability and self-efficacy was tested using structural equation modeling. Usability strongly mediated the relationship between 3-D virtual reality features, spatial orientation, self-efficacy, and presence. Spatial orientation and self-efficacy had a statistically significant, positive impact on the chemistry learning test. The purpose of the third study was to investigate the potential of Second Life (SL), a 3-D virtual world, to enhance undergraduate students? learning of a foundational chemistry concept, spatial ability, and self-efficacy. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design was used. A total of 387 participants completed three assignment activities either in Second Life or using 2-D images. The difference between the scores of 3-D virtual environment-based group and the 2-D images-based group was not statistically significant for any of the measures.

Previous studies suggest that 3D visualization is fundamental to design spatial cognition, and the capability to work with 3D mental or physical models and taking perspective views from a set of 2D drawings are essential parts of design education, although there is no definitive evidence that can directly support these beliefs. This dissertation focuses on the issues of how spatial capabilities correlate with design performance and whether design education can improve students' spatial capabilities. Two types of capabilities tests, i.e. spatial capability test and general reasoning test, are used, and there are 251 Georgia Tech undergraduate students involved in this research. The results of this research suggest that the correlations between design studio performance and the tested factors are more salient among female students than male students. While female students generally have lower spatial capabilities than male students in design, they can take advantage of their general reasoning capability to compensate for the lack of the other two spatial capabilities and perform well in design studio. A stepwise regression further reveals that, for the female design student group, the general reasoning capability is the only predictor for their design performance. However, no significant interaction is observed in the male design student group between tested capabilities and design studio performance. As a result, there seems to exist a threshold requirement in spatial capabilities for design major students. After passing this threshold, other factors such as domain specific skills and knowledge or self-motivation would likely to be the dominant one. Lastly, although the results show the tested capabilities are all important for design major students from different perspectives, the design education does not show any contribution in the improvement of these capabilities.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2001. / Includes abstract. "MQ-66385"--Fiche header. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-40).