Cross-disciplinary impact of spatial visualization ability on study success in higher education

Spatial ability emerged as a key factor for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. But so far there are no studies on differences in this effect between different STEM domains. The current study used content knowledge tests at the beginning (pretest) and the end of the semester (posttest) as comparable measure for study success in civil engineering ( n = 247), chemistry ( n = 425), and biology ( n = 325) first-year university students from eight German universities. To evaluate the effect’s specificity for STEM domains, we also included social science ( n = 360) as a non-STEM domain. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that spatial ability is an incremental predictor of posttest content knowledge beyond high school grade point average (GPA), reasoning ability, and pretest content knowledge. Furthermore, multiple-group mediation modeling found that spatial ability is related to prior knowledge and high school GPA, resulting in substantial indirect effects that varied between domains while the direct effect was stable. Our results add a direct comparison across different domains to the extensive body of literature on the effect of spatial ability on success in STEM domains: This effect is stronger engineering (total b = 0.81) and chemistry (total b = 0.83) than in biology (total b = 0.68) and social science (total b = 0.51). However, the substantial effect even in the non-STEM domain of social science indicates that spatial ability might be relevant for higher education in general. Mathematical skills and visual model comprehension skills are discussed as possible connections between spatial ability and study success. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)