Improvement of Spatial Problem Solving Ability through Descriptive Geometry Education

It is widely believed that one of the main purposes of an early under graduate graphics curriculum is to improve the student's ability to visualize and solve spatial problems (hereafter we call this ability as VSSP ability) . There are, however, few studies on the evaluation of the im-provement of the student's VSSP ability through the curriculum. Therefore, it is not exactly clear whether the educational purpose is well accomplished or not. In order to resolve this question and to improve on the curriculum, it is necessary to develop methods of measuring the VSSP ability and to make pre and post test to the curriculum. As an attempt to gain some insight into these problems, we gave intuitive tests to the students before and after the descriptive geometry course. In the intuitive tests, the students are asked to determine the true cutting views after being given pictorial views of objects and cutting planes. The scores of the pre and post intuitive tests, together with the scores of the term-end test on descriptive geometry, were statistically analyzed. The analysis shows that the student's VSSP ability was improved through the education of descriptive geometry.