The Understanding of Pictorial Spatial Relationships by Nigerian Secondary School Students

Abstract

A specially-designed test was used in three related investigations concerned with the ability of Nigerian secondary-school students to understand depth relationships in pictures. The first investigation demonstrated that the percentage of students unable to achieve the criterion performance decreased significantly from 61.7% for second-year students to 22.5% for fifth-year students. Both groups were significantly poorer in performance than a sample of English third-year students. In the second investigation the understanding of these spatial relationships in diagrams was found to require a prior understanding of the same relationships in the corresponding three-dimensional object. In the third investigation a factor analysis showed that there were factors associated with the understanding of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal displacements, respectively.