Collaborative Research: Discipline-Specific Methods to Build Foundational Knowledge About Spatial Skills that are Relevant to Contemporary Engineering Practice

Collaborative Research: Expert use of spatial skills within engineering practice to lay the groundwork for future transformation of engineer-formation system Spatial skills are widely considered to be important for success in STEM. However, current approaches to spatial skills training and assessment in engineering education rely on generic, abstract materials which are not discipline-speci?c. Developing and practicing spatial skills is most effective when contextualized within a speci?c discipline, but research lacks an understanding of the role and variation of spatial skills within individual disciplines for practicing engineering professionals. Therefore, there exists a need to build foundational knowledge about how spatial skills are contextualized within individual engineering disciplines, a foundation that is necessary to inform future educational interventions. To address this knowledge gap, we will focus on two disciplines (civil and mechanical engineering) and will 1) use ethnographic observation to determine how spatial information is embedded in practice, and 2) determine how practicing engineers communicate spatial information via graphical artifacts.