Many analysis tools are available that can help provide students with a detailed understanding of engineering systems and equipment. This is particularly true when the output from these tools is displayed in a virtual environment (VE) enabling the students to see the results in a natural user-centered environment. To obtain the greatest teaching advantage, educators need to know which of the available formats students best understand. This thesis compares different techniques for visualizing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data in a VE for the education of technicians and engineers. CFD data has both vector and scalar components, and two standards of visualization are compared for each component. The ability of students to analyze and interpret these types of three-dimensional data sets within a VE is measured. Vector fields are compared to streamlines for the visualization of vector data, and contour plots are compared to isosurfaces for the visualization of scalar data. These comparisons are made for two different groups of student volunteers, one composed of typical community college technical students and the other composed of juniors/seniors in mechanical engineering. The mechanical engineering group showed no preference between the vector field and streamlines methods when analyzing vector data, but the community college technical students showed a strong preference for the streamlines method. This indicates that students who have a formal fluid mechanics education understand each method equally, while those without one are able to understand CFD data better using streamlines. Both groups showed a strong preference for the contours method over the isosurfaces method when analyzing scalar data.