EXPLORING THE SPATIAL ABILITY OF UNDERGRADUATES AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC

Spatial thinking has been linked to performance in STEM and the geosciences, especially in academic settings. However, few studies have explored how trends in primary and secondary school and undergraduate institutions manifest in experiences and career choices post-academia. Our theoretical framework is spatial thinking is malleable and can change depending on the experiences and training one has had. The purpose of this study was to explore the spatial thinking skills of the general public to elucidate connections between education, career, and demographic factors and their scores on a spatial assessment. We utilized the validated Spatial Reasoning Instrument by Ramful et al. (2017) to assess respondent mental rotation, spatial orientation, and spatial visualization skills (Cronbach’s alpha=0.83). In addition to these items, we created and validated 14 additional items to assess respondent spatial confidence, experiences and perspectives (Cronbach’s alpha=0.88). The assessment was distributed to the general adult population (N=981) located in the United States using a population of workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTURK). We also compared the spatial assessment performance of these participants to undergraduate students (N=567) using the same spatial assessment, and we will present how these two groups performed differently. We will also present the results of a regression analysis on the general public sample that determined which factors we collected (e.g., gender, spatial experience, age, major, career, etc.) have the largest impact on spatial assessment performance. This study contributes to research that emphasizes the transfer of spatial skills from education to career and how experiences after graduation continue to shape spatial thinking outcomes.