Abstract:

In this article we share our experience and results of our research in the area of psychological personality examination focused on spatial imagination of students and its development.
This research involved the first class bachelor students of the Faculty of Operation and Economics of Transport and Communications of the University of Zilina and the Faculty of Wood Sciences and Technology of the Technical University in Zvolen.
For the research had been used well known Vandenberg and Kuse’s Mental Rotation Test (MRT).
The study was carried out in three phases. The first phase took place in the beginning of the winter semester in the academic year 2015/2016. In this semester the students of both faculties completed the Geometry course or Descriptive Geometry course respective to their faculties and after completing this courses, students were tested second time in the beginning of the summer semester during spring 2016.
The third phase was about processing the results and comparing the influence that had the successful completion of Geometry / Descriptive geometry courses on the development of spatial imagination of the students. At this phase we used non-parametric statistical tests as the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, the Mann-Whitney U-test, the Kruskal-Wallis test, and others to analyse the impact of the individual characteristics of the students on the test results. We analysed the impact of factors as type of secondary school, state exam from mathematics, field of study, handedness. To compare the test results from the beginnings of the winter and the summer semester 2015/16 we used the Wilcoxon pair test.

Keywords:

Spatial imagination, Mental Rotation Test, geometry, descriptive geometry, non-parametric test.