IMPROVING SPATIAL ABILITY SKILLS OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS IN BASIC ENGINEERING DRAWING USING A SOLID PAIR MODEL

Good spatial ability skills are an important component of an engineer’s ability to create and interpret engineering drawings, which is demanding in thinking, being a problem-solving process. The ability of an engineer to visualize in 3D is a cognitive skill that is attached to success in basic engineering drawing subjects. Engineering and technology education students need good spatial ability skills to understand several topics in basic engineering drawings like orthographic projection, axonometric drawing, sectional view, and hidden details drawings. This study aims at improving spatial ability skills using a solid pair model among first-year technical education students of Kaduna State College of Education Gidan Waya. A Quasi-experimental research design was used for the study, a standards pre and post-test were used to conduct a visualization transformation assessment to measure the students’ level of spatial ability skills. The study shows that after treatment using a solid pair model, the student without prior knowledge in basic engineering performed above average, likewise students with prior knowledge in the control and experimental group performed above average. The results indicate that a solid pair model was effective for improving spatial ability skills among first-year technical education students. This study implies to educators that there is need to appropriately enforce the use of a solid pair model for effective teaching and learning of basic engineering drawing. It is, therefore, affirmed that the use of a solid pair model in teaching basic engineering drawings should be enhanced with other teaching methods.