The Effectiveness of College Classes

In “Visuospatial Thinking in the Professional Writing Classroom”, Claire Lauer and Christopher A. Sanchez conducted a case study with an undergraduate writing class at Arizona State University to observe how visuospatial thinking abilities impact students’ visual designs. Though their research is indeed interesting, and seems to be worth researching, I think there were too many variables involved with their study.

Firstly, Lauer and Sanchez say that the “participants in both groups [they studied – one group of students with low spatial abilities, and one with high spatial abilities] were well matched in their previous course work and relevant computer skills” (191). Lauer and Sanchez base this judgment off of some statistics they present in the paper through a table (191). Low spatial ability students had, on average, taken 2.75 design classes prior to the study, and high spatial ability students averaged 1.67 design classes (191). I am now a graduate student, was once an undergraduate and I must say: Taking 1.08 more classes on a subject than another person is a big deal. I would not think such a difference in classes is completely negligible, even when considering deviations from the statistics. A single semester can tell you a lot about a subject.

I doubt Lauer and Sanchez would disagree with me, too, because one of important part of their paper is the section in which they provide advice on teaching visuospatial abilities; they believe, then, that visuospatial abilities can be taught and learned. Their beliefs about teaching visuospatial abilities are also reinforced by Figure 2 from their paper (193) in which it is shown that the average scores for both low and high visuospatial ability groups improved during the single semester during which they observed those students. A single semester’s worth of a case study in which “the performance of both groups of students [in the study] increased with instruction” was enough for them to draw conclusions for their published paper.

I know it may be pretty crummy to harp on someone else’s research in a blog post, particularly when the research analyzed calls, as it should, for other scholars to take deeper looks into the overall problem/issue (212), and therefore does not claim to be definitive. The conclusions of Lauer of Sanchez, though, gave me mixed feelings nonetheless. At one point they say an extra semester of instruction on a subject does not keep a student from being “on more or less equal footing” (191) than another student, while showing, at another point, statistics proving that student performance can improve, in a single semester, through instruction. Does performance not have anything to do with how much a student has learned, then? Or did the researchers assume that the low spatial students were so poor with visuospatial learning that any head start they had with design courses was rendered moot by the spatial strength of their counterparts?