Visual Spatial Ability In First Year Engineering Students: A Useful Retention Variable?

A longstanding and robust performance gap on tests of visual-spatial ability has been well documented in the cognitive psychology literature, with women, in general, having less welldeveloped skills, especially on tasks of mental rotation. 1,2,3 Visual-spatial ability, also called spatial visualization, is defined by McGee as the ability to mentally rotate, twist, or invert pictorially presented visual stimuli. 4 The ability to discern relationships between shapes and objects has also been found to be an important factor for, if not predictive of, success in disciplines that involve the manipulation of objects in spatial environments such as engineering, chemistry, and computer science. 5,6,7 According to Cooper and Mumaw, 8 the spatial aptitude literature is quite clear in showing that a broadly defined spatial factor exists independently of verbal and quantitative factors and that this spatial factor is more effective than other measures of intelligence in predicting success in certain academic and industrial areas.