Spatial ability’s contribution to pupils’ creative design performance

Abstract

Prior research examining the relationship between spatial ability and creative design performance among college students has yielded mixed findings. Even less is known about how spatial ability predicts creative design performance in younger pupils and how its role compares to other cognitive abilities commonly linked to design performance, such as creativity. This study examines how spatial ability, divergent thinking, and creative imagery abilities predict design performance across two stages—ideation and prototyping—in a sample of 201 pupils aged 10 to 14. Results revealed that spatial ability correlated significantly with design ideation, design prototype, and divergent thinking scores, but not with creative imagery. Using hierarchical regression analyses, we examined the unique contributions of each cognitive skill to design ideation and design prototype performance. Creative imagery abilities significantly predicted design ideation scores after controlling for age and verbal ability, whereas divergent thinking and spatial ability did not. However, in predicting design prototype performance, spatial ability emerged as a significant predictor in addition to creative imagery abilities and divergent thinking. Mediation analysis further revealed that creativity did not meaningfully mediate the relationship between spatial ability and either design ideation or prototype scores. Taken together, our results suggest that while creative imagery abilities are important for generating creative design ideas during ideation, spatial ability plays a distinct role over and above creativity as pupils develop initial ideas into sketched prototypes.