Spatial Skills and Computing Science

The RIPPA 2021 aims to find out whether a) first-year students with better spatial skills have better programming skills (regardless of teaching environment or method), b) whether spatial skills change over a period of computing instruction and c) what demographic data contribute towards high spatial ability. Future goals of the project will be to investigate whether improving first-year students' spatial skills improves their programming skills (regardless of teaching environment or method).

Background

Research into spatial skills and computing science has flourished in recent years, with several recent studies exploring the relationship 1, 2, 3 . Spatial skills have been associated with success in computing courses and specific domains of computing (for example, source code navigation 4 and expression evaluation 5 ) and training spatial skills has been demonstrated to improve CS outcomes for early-stage students 6, 7, 8 . Low spatial ability also appears to be related to demographic groups with historically lower participation and outcomes in CS programmes: those from lower socio-economic status backgrounds and women 9, 10 . Hence spatial skills research can potentially be of high value for our discipline.

To date these studies have involved only a handful of individual institutions. The goal of this project is to understand more about the role of spatial skills across a one-year period for entry-level CS students across multiple institutions. In particular, the RIPPA would like to determine whether correlations between spatial ability and success in CS hold across institutions, whether spatial ability changes over a period of CS instruction and how spatial ability exhibits in different demographic groups.

Research Questions

Although we intend on exploring these concepts in more detail, the high-level research questions for this project are as follows:

Project Outline

We intend on conducting three spatial skills tests (one at the start of the students' first semester, one at the end of their first semester and one at the end of their first full academic year) which will allow us to investigate the rate of change of spatial ability over an entire academic year (helping to answer RQ1). With the initial measure of spatial ability, we can also chart a student's academic route through their university programme and investigate the potential role of spatial skills, helping us to answer RQ2 . Adidtionally, we can investigate these academic pathways with respect to gender and socio-economic status, demographics which have both been observed to correlate with success in computing programmes in the past, therefore answering RQ3 and RQ4.

Team

Publications