ABSTRACT
Individual differences in spatial ability were explored among educational psychology and engineering students as they related to performance on a real-world spatial task known as the orthographic projection task. As expected, educators performed higher on verbal aptitude tests than engineers, and engineers performed higher on spatial aptitude tests than psychologists. Individuals differ in a variety of cognitive aptitudes for learning from instruction, and no one instructional treatment has been found optimal for all kinds of students. It is clear that student aptitude and instructional treatment variables interact. Spatial abilities form a part of the visual thinking used in everyday life. Common activities, such as maneuvering a car along an unfamiliar road or rearranging furniture, require visual thinking as do the more complex tasks of translating blueprints into buildings. A process-analytic approach has been used to examine quantitative differences in observed performance as well as qualitative differences with regard to the strategies used by individuals on spatial processing tasks.
