This research used a spatial skills test and cognitive-mapping test to examine the effect of GIS learning on the spatial ability and spatial problem solving of college students. A total of 80 participants, undergraduate students at Texas A&M University, completed pre- and post- spatial skills tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Analysis of changes in the students’ test scores revealed that GIS learning could help students improve their spatial ability. Strong correlations existed between the participants’ spatial ability and their performance in the GIS course. The research also found that spatial ability improvement linked to GIS learning was not significantly related to differences in gender or to academic major (geography majors vs. science and engineering majors). A total of 64 participants, recruited from students enrolled in Introduction to GIS and Computer Cartography at Texas A&M University, completed pre- and post- cognitive-mapping tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Students’ performance on the cognitive-mapping test was used to measure their spatial problem solving. The study assumed that the analysis of the individual map-drawing strategies would reveal information about the cognitive processes participants used to solve their spatial tasks. The participants were requested to draw a map that could help their best friends find their way to three nearby commercial locations. The map-drawing process was videotaped in order to allow the researcher to classify subjects’ map-drawing strategies. The study identified two distinctive map-drawing strategies: hierarchical and regional. Strategies were classified as hierarchical when subjects began by drawing the main road network across the entire map, and as regional when they completed mapping sub-areas before moving on to another sub-area. After completion of a GIS course, a significant number of participants (about half) changed their map-drawing strategies. However, more research is necessary to address why these changes in strategy came about.

Simulation is an important tool when training is hazardous, time consuming, or expensive. Simulation can also be used to enhance reality by adding features normally not available in the real world. The aim with this work has been to develop and evaluate methods that could improve learning in oral radiology utilising a radiation-free simulator environment. Virtual reality software for radiographic examinations was developed. The virtual environment consisted of a model of a patient, an x-ray machine, and a film. Simulated radiographic images of the patient model could be rendered as perspective projections based on the relative position between the individual models. The software was incorporated in an oral radiology simulator with a training program for interpretation of spatial relations in radiographs. Projection geometry was validated by comparing length dimensions in simulated radiographs with the corresponding theoretically calculated distances. The results showed that projection error in the simulated images never exceeded 0.5 mm. Dental students participated in studies on skill in interpreting spatial information in radiographs utilising parallax. Conventional and simulator based training methods were used. Training lasted for 90 minutes. Skill in interpreting spatial information was assessed with a proficiency test before training, immediately after training, and eight months after training. Visual-spatial ability was assessed with mental rotations test, version A (MRT-A). Regression analysis revealed a significant (P<0.01) association between visual-spatial ability and proficiency test results after training. At simulator training, proficiency test results immediately after training were significantly higher than before training (P<0.01). Among students with low MTR-A scores, improvement after simulator training was higher than after conventional training. Eight months after simulator training proficiency test results were lower than immediately after training. The test results were, however, still higher than before training. In conclusion, the simulation software produces simulated radiographs of high geometric accuracy. Acquisition of skill to interpret spatial relations in radiographs is facilitated for individuals with high visual-spatial ability. Simulator training improves acquisition of interpretative skill and is especially beneficial for individuals with low visual-spatial ability. The results indicate that radiology simulation can be an effective training method.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the spatial strategies of adults and the difficulties they experience while solving spatial visualization problems. To achieve this purpose, a case study is conducted and the case of this study is the group of five adults studying secondary or elementary mathematics education in a public university in Ankara. Spatial Ability Test (SAT) and task based interviews are utilized to determine the participants&rsquo / spatial abilities / and to interpret their strategies, and their difficulties in solving spatial visualization problems. The present study reveals that, the participants&rsquo / spatial strategies are mainly categorized as: holistic, analytic and intermediate strategies. Moreover, substrategies are defined / for holistic strategies / mental rotation and mental manipulation strategies / for analytic strategies, key feature and counting strategies / and for intermediate strategies, partial rotation, partial manipulation and pattern-based strategies. Additionally, for each sub-strategy different ways of using that strategy are defined. As an example when using mental manipulation strategy, participants use two different ways / imagining the folding and imagining the sequence. It is also concluded that when the strategies are selected, characteristics of the problems are important. This study shows that the difficulties of the participants in solving spatial visualization problems can be mainly categorized as: limited flexibility and inadequate proficiency. The results of this study provides detailed descriptions of strategies and difficulties of adults in solving spatial visualization problems to be used in designing tools for assessment or development of spatial visualization ability.

This research used a spatial skills test and cognitive-mapping test to examine the effect of GIS learning on the spatial ability and spatial problem solving of college students. A total of 80 participants, undergraduate students at Texas A&M University, completed pre- and post- spatial skills tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Analysis of changes in the students’ test scores revealed that GIS learning could help students improve their spatial ability. Strong correlations existed between the participants’ spatial ability and their performance in the GIS course. The research also found that spatial ability improvement linked to GIS learning was not significantly related to differences in gender or to academic major (geography majors vs. science and engineering majors). A total of 64 participants, recruited from students enrolled in Introduction to GIS and Computer Cartography at Texas A&M University, completed pre- and post- cognitive-mapping tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Students’ performance on the cognitive-mapping test was used to measure their spatial problem solving. The study assumed that the analysis of the individual map-drawing strategies would reveal information about the cognitive processes participants used to solve their spatial tasks. The participants were requested to draw a map that could help their best friends find their way to three nearby commercial locations. The map-drawing process was videotaped in order to allow the researcher to classify subjects’ map-drawing strategies. The study identified two distinctive map-drawing strategies: hierarchical and regional. Strategies were classified as hierarchical when subjects began by drawing the main road network across the entire map, and as regional when they completed mapping sub-areas before moving on to another sub-area. After completion of a GIS course, a significant number of participants (about half) changed their map-drawing strategies. However, more research is necessary to address why these changes in strategy came about.

Many architects report about mentally visualizing 3D aspects of their design ideas while simply working with 2D sketches of them. Indeed, in architecture, the general practice of conveying 3D building information by means of 2D drawings bears on the assumptions that every architect can mentally visualize a building in 3D by looking at its 2D drawings or sketches and that architects, as many report, can capture the 3D aspects of a building design during such 3D mental visualization practices. Additionally, many intuitively believe that the levels at which architects perform such 3D mental visualization practices is highly correlated to their spatial visualization abilities as defined by existing measures of spatial visualization ability. This thesis presents the outcomes of protocol studies and analyses that were conducted with the aim of developing an in-depth understanding about such 3D mental visualization practices and capabilities of architects on the basis of four research questions. First, what might be the nature of the 3D mental visualization phenomena that architects claim to experience: what are the features of these 3D mental visualizations as evidenced in specific tasks; and what might be the nature of the mental representations created during these visualization processes? Second, can every architect carry out these 3D mental visualization practices; might there be individual differences among architects' performances? Third, might 3D mental visualization of buildings be only an architectural skill; can non-architects, who can read 2D architectural drawings, visualize a building in 3D based on its 2D drawings and can they do so to the same levels of performance of those of architects? Fourth, might performance in 3D mental visualization tasks be related to/predicted by spatial visualization ability? The major conclusions of this thesis with regard to the first research question include that (1) architects can be visualizing the buildings in one of the two major forms or by alternatively switching between them: by imagining themselves situated within (almost) the actual size 3D building environment or by imagining a 3D small scale model of the building; (2) the mental representations they create during these visualization processes capture the various visual and spatial aspects of the buildings with a structure similar to that of an actual size or small scale model of the visualized space/form, yet the way they capture these aspects is not like the way these aspects would be captured from a certain viewpoint in reality; and (3) what they experience during these visualization processes is not like the continuous holistic visuospatial experience that one would have when looking at a building or walking inside/around a building. With regard to the second, third and fourth research questions this thesis concludes that (question 2) architects differ in their 3D mental visualization skills; (question 3) 3D mental visualization is an architectural skill in that it relies on certain abilities that become heightened in architects, possibly during education; and (question 4) 3D mental visualization skills are not related to spatial visualization ability as defined by the standard paper-folding test of spatial visualization ability.

Male mammals typically outperform females in tests of spatial ability. However, in laboratory rats (Rattus norvegicus), from which the majority of data in support of this difference come, sex differences are not consistently found. Since stress affects cognition in males and females differently, I investigated possible sources of stress (e.g. housing conditions, spatial tasks) and the impact they have on cognitive performance in male and female rats. Firstly, I investigated whether isolation housing, purported to be chronically stressful, affected the presence of sex differences in a dark-eyed and an albino strain of rat. Irrespective of sex and strain, I found that young or old rats isolated for long or short periods were not behaviourally or cognitively impaired relative to pairhoused conspecifics. I found, however, that behaviour caused by the acute stress of the task impeded performance. Furthermore, sex differences in performance were found only when the females were more stressed than the males during testing. Additionally, the degree to which the rats found the task stressful depended upon the age at which they travelled from the breeding establishment. In the dark-eyed strain, males were always less stressed than the females, but also out performed the females only if they travelled while young (4-5 weeks old). Both sexes seemed to be less stressed by the task if the rats travelled as adults. Conversely, in the albino strain, males outperformed females only if the rats travelled as adults, because in the young travellers both sexes were equally and highly stressed during testing. Therefore, the acute stress response, which seems to underlie sex differences in cognitive performance, was influenced by the age at which the rats travelled in a sex and strain dependent manner. Next, I considered the impact of the physical attributes of the home cage on a rat’s welfare and performance in a cognitive task. I found that, male and female rats housed with a barrier that reduced visual contact from their cage showed higher levels of behavioural stress in their home cage than did rats housed without a barrier between the cages. Rats housed with the barrier were also more stressed during spatial testing and had poorer cognitive performance relative to rats housed without the barrier. Pair housing did not ameliorate the effect of the barrier. Based on these data, although a rather unorthodox suggestion, I propose that single housing with a view may be preferable to pair housing without a view. One implication of this finding is that the number of animals used in an experiment could be significantly reduced if the home cages allow sufficient visual interactions. Lastly, I investigated the impact of environmental enrichment on spatial cognition and behavioural stress responses. I found, contrary to current opinion, that enriched rats outperformed non-enriched animals not because they had superior cognitive ability but because their behavioural stress response was reduced significantly during testing. Furthermore, withdrawing enrichment from rats for at least one week did not increase stress responses during testing or impair cognitive performance. Therefore, exposure to enrichment, even if later withdrawn, improves welfare by reducing stress during cognitive testing. In conclusion, a differential behavioural stress response during cognitive testing may explain why males outperform females and why enriched animals do better than non-enriched animals in tests of spatial cognition. Furthermore, variation in this behavioural stress response may in part explain why sex differences in performance are not consistently found in laboratory rats.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are problem-solving environments that provide individualised instruction and are able to adapt to the abilities and needs of each individual student in order to maximise effective learning. They provide feedback on students' actions, but a problem arises when students do not always understand the feedback they receive. Therefore, it would be beneficial for students to be able to ask for additional clarifications at any time, and to receive feedback customised to their individual differences. This research focuses on providing an additional help channel in ITSs where students are able to ask free-form questions, as well as accounting for the students' psychometric measure of spatial ability. We describe ERM-Tutor, the test-bed ITS chosen for implementing our research framework. ERM-Tutor is a constraint-based tutoring system for teaching logical database design. Students practise this procedural task in ERM-Tutor by solving each step and receiving feedback on their solutions. We also present our approach to addressing the meta-cognitive skill of question-asking in ERM-Tutor. We added a question-asking module that enables students to ask free-form questions and receive the most appropriate answers stored in the system. In addition, we investigated the potential of tailoring the feedback messages towards the learners' psychometric measure of spatial ability. We modified ERM-Tutor to provide not only textual feedback messages, but also multimedia messages, containing a combination of text and pictures. We performed a series of evaluation studies in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions. All our studies were conducted with tertiary students enrolled in an introductory database course. The students had attended lectures on logical database design and were asked to use ERM-Tutor to develop and practise their mapping skills. The results show an overall improvement in performance and learning gain for all students using ERM-Tutor. Interactions with the question-asking module show that most questions asked by students were task-focused, directly requesting help on specific errors. The results confirm the need for addressing students' questions inside an ITS environment. Furthermore, there were no conclusive results to support a difference in effectiveness of the textual versus multimedia feedback presentation modes with respect to the students' spatial ability. However, we observed a number of trends indicating that matching the instruction presentation mode towards the students spatial ability influences their perception of the system and motivation to use it, more than their learning gain. Our results show promising indications for further explorations. We present our approaches, full analyses of the collected data from our evaluation studies, as well as our research contributions to the ITSs field. We also portray a number of future directions that will contribute towards maximising the effectiveness of learning in ITSs.

“Origami-mathematics lessons” (Boakes, 2006) blend the ancient art of paper folding with the teaching of mathematics. Though a plethora of publications can be easily found advocating the benefits of Origami in the teaching of mathematics, little research exist to quantify the impact Origami has on the learning and building of mathematical skills. The research presented in this paper targets this common claim focusing on how Origamimathematics lessons taught over an extended period of time impact students’ knowledge of geometry and their spatial visualization abilities. The paper begins with a brief overview of Origami as it relates to teaching mathematics followed by a summary of research done with two age groups: middle school children and college students. Gathered data in these two studies suggest that Origami-mathematics lessons are as beneficial as traditional instructional methods in teaching mathematics.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-106).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-49).