The relationship between spatial sense and secondary three students' learning of the solid visualization in 3D figures

Abstract

In this study, the spatial sense development before and after learning the topic “More about 3D figures” was investigated and the spatial sense differences of junior secondary students among genders and ability groups with similar social-economical background were analyzed. The performance of secondary 1 to 3 students (N = 374) on a 24multiple-choice questions of Mental Rotation Test (MRT) which can reflect students’ spatial sense (Peters et al., 1995; Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) was measured. The results showed that after lesson intervention in S3, (1) the mean difference of overall spatial sense is statistically significantly improved at the 0.01 level, (2) the mean difference of the performance in hard level questions has more significant improvement than the easy and medium level questions statistically at the .001 level, and (3) the mean difference of the performance twisted view questions had a significant change than in overlapped view question at the .001 level.

For gender difference, considerable differences in the MRT of male and female students in all junior forms were found at 0.001 level in which support the literatures that male advantage in spatial tasks than female (Hedges & Nowell, 1995; Voyer, 1996; Voyer et al., 1995). In ability group difference, results revealed that significant differences were found in S2 and S3 top ability students’ performance in medium level questions at .05 level, and S3 top ability students’ performance in twisted-overlapped view questions at .05 level. It is believed that moderate and complicated mental rotation was more challenging for most of the students with low-average ability but not top students from the findings. For the implications, this study further confirmed that the needs of specific teaching strategies or manipulatives (scaffolds) in geometry learning in the existence of spatial sense difference among genders or mathematics ability groups.