Normalization, validity, and reliability of visual perception test development among architecture students

In the process of architectural education, visual perception is an important tool to reach creative ideas, and its defects are one of the main reasons for learning disability. It has led to extensive research in the field of educational technology regarding the type and method of visual perception intervention to improve the quality of education. For this purpose, the main goal of the research is to develop a tool to identify the level of students' visual perception, which plays a very important role in identifying their abilities and perceptual levels. There are various tests available to check visual perception at different ages, including four tests ((TVPS - 4), (DTVP - A/DTVP-2), (OT - APST), (Frostig Test)) that have been used for young and healthy people.

In the current research, the above tests are extended to create a new test demanding to distinguish visual capabilities and defects in architecture students. In the first step, the opinions of architecture and psychology experts are used via a questionnaire and considering final improvements, opinions are presented on subtests reform. The presented visual perception test consists of nine sub-tests derived from three initial branches named spatial, visual, and mental skills. To determine the standard of students and calculate the reliability and validity of the test, 90 people from the second year of Bachelor of Architecture at Islamic Azad University, Bandar Abbas are selected by judgmental sampling method, and the test is conducted on them as a group.

The findings include the norm scores for test separately derived from 9 sub-tests by gender and semester through the calculation of Cronbach's alpha, which is 0.631. Validity determination is applied through the criterion of the grades of the introductory course 3, expression 3, and architecture design 1, and their average is calculated as the correlation coefficients between the scores obtained from the test. Finally, it is found that in this test, the growth of visual perception in women is more than that of men.

The findings are in line with the results obtained by other cooperative researchers. This means that the perception test has acceptable validity. Calculating the correlation depends on homogeneous terms the grades of expression 2, introductions 3, and design 1 and their average, which has high homogeneity. Finally, methods have been presented that can have an effective interference on the results of the visual perception test. In addition to the development of the visual perception test, the results can bring suggestions in the future planning of practical architecture lessons and introduce areas for further research. The results of the present research can be useful for measuring the visual perception of undergraduate architecture students and play an effective role in the curriculum planning of architecture as well as interdisciplinary fields. It should be noted that in the field of academic planning, semesters and theoretical and practical courses, more extensive research can be planned and implemented to generalize the results. This article also summarizes the successful experiences and challenges of improving pedagogical methods.