Journal
LEARNING AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Volume 19, Issue 1, Pages 61-70Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.lindif.2008.04.006
Keywords
Spatial abilities; Dental education; Mental representations; Spatial transformations
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In two studies with a total of 324 participants, dentistry students were assessed on psychometric measures of spatial ability, reasoning ability, and on new measures of the ability to infer the appearance of a cross-section of a three-dimensional (3-D) object. We examined how these abilities and skills predict success in dental education programs, and whether dental education enhances an individual's spatial competence. The cross-section tests were correlated with spatial ability measures, even after controlling for reasoning ability. Suggesting that they rely specifically on the ability to store and transform spatial representations. Sex differences in these measures indicated a male advantage, as is often found on measures of spatial ability. Spatial ability was somewhat predictive of performance in restorative dentistry practical laboratory classes, but not of learning anatomy in general. Comparisons of the performance of students early and late in their dental education indicated that dentistry students develop spatial mental models of the 3-D structure of teeth, which improves their ability to mentally maintain and manipulate representations of these specific structures, but there is no evidence that dental education improves spatial transformation abilities more generally. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available