Analysis of Spatial Comprehension Through a Retrospective Study of Its Effects Among First Year Electrical Engineering Students

Abstract

To achieve the competences required by engineering students, spatial reasoning skills—understood as the ability to mentally visualise, position, and manipulate an object—are of critical importance. Whilst some authors regard these skills to be innate, other studies show that these can be trained with interactive exercises. The objective of the present study is to identify the impact of these skills in our students, regardless of the metric with which these competences are measured. In the School of Industrial Engineering at the University of Malaga, students took part in a practical exercise in spatial reasoning by reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. In the present study, the results of more than 400 engineering students were analysed during the periods of the 2012/13 and 2018/19 courses. In addition to describing the time course of the results obtained, we also compared the improvements in performance over time.