RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRATEGIES USED TO SOLVE SPATIAL ORIENTATION PROBLEM AND EXAMINATION SCORES IN DESCRIPTIVE GEOMETRY

摘要

A spatial orientation problem (SO-problem), which was developed to evaluate non-curriculum-based ability, was administered to freshmen prior to a course of descriptive geometry (DG course) together with the Mental Cutting Test (MCT). In the SO-problem, several statements concerning the direction of walking and the angle of turning are given, and examinees are asked to identify the direction the person was or was not walking in at a certain point in the sequence. This paper focuses on the relationship between the SO-problem scores from a term-end test of the DG course. There was no significant relationship between the scores of the SO-problem and those of any problems of the DG term-end test. However, the correlation between scores from the MCT and those from the DG term-end test was significant. This suggests that abilities evaluated by the SO-problem differ from those evaluated by the MCT. Students who used a highly abstracted strategy earned higher scores from a difficult problem on the construction of an intersection of two solids in the DG term-end test than those who did not use the strategy. Further investigation is necessary to confirm the reproducibility of tendencies in the relationship between strategy preference for the SO-problem and understanding of descriptive geometry.