Effectiveness of technology education learning activities on the improvement of spatial skills

A skill set important to student success in engineering studies is spatial skills. It is important, therefore, to provide opportunities to improve these skills in the curriculum. Research has demonstrated that spatial skills are trainable, and the subsequent literature on initiatives and interventions is robust. We are interested in validating earlier research on the efficacy of traditional technology education learning activities, such as technical drawing, on the improvement of spatial skills. The results indicate that technical and perspective drawing and projects involving the manipulation of 3D objects contribute to improvements in spatial skill levels. These findings do validate previous work. The re-investigation of “old school” interventions may be of particular interest to P-12 engineering educators working with constrained resources.