INTERACTIVE SPATIAL TRAINING ANIMATES SEX DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE AMONG FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Abstract

In a 2 × 2 (sex × intervention) experiment we investigated sex differences in performance gains and transfer after training on a brief intervention that used interactive animation and virtual objects to improve performance on a spatial visualization task. Participants were male and female first-year engineering students at a large public university who scored in the lower 60th percentile of a distribution of their peers on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test. Compared to the control group, trained participants of both sexes showed significant improvement on stimuli viewed during the intervention. Further, trained participants significantly outperformed untrained participants on a transfer task, with trained female participants significantly outperforming trained male participants. We suggest possible explanations for the lack of sex differences in performance on the trained task and for the significant advantage demonstrated by trained female participants on the transfer task. We propose that a female engineering role model may confer a motivational advantage to female entry-level engineering students.