Browsing by Subject "Geography education"
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Item Aspects of spatial thinking in geography textbook questions(2009-05-15) Jo, InjeongThis study examined questions embedded in four high school world geography textbooks to evaluate the degree to which the three components of spatial thinking were incorporated: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking to assess the questions was developed and validated via a survey of a group of spatial thinking experts. The spatiality of the concepts featured in 3,010 questions sampled from the textbooks was analyzed. The degree to which spatial representations and stimuli for reasoning were presented was also measured. Every question was compared against the taxonomy and coded. Inter-coder reliability was measured on about one percent of the sample questions. The results indicated that most questions that required knowledge about spatial concepts could be answered by knowing only simple concepts, such as location and place-specific identity, rather than complex concepts that require the identification of spatial patterns and associations. Not many questions asked students to incorporate spatial representations to answer the questions. Few questions did require creating a new representation. Students were asked to recall memorized geographic knowledge and terms rather than to infer, hypothesize, and generalize. Little difference was found among the four textbooks in that they rarely integrated the three components of spatial thinking into the questions. The research found that page-margin questions involved aspects of spatial thinking more than section- and chapter-assessment questions. Relatively simple concepts and lower level cognitive processes, however, were required in most questions that integrated the three components. The development of questions to help students practice complex processes of spatial thinking is necessary. The taxonomy developed in this research can be used as a guide to design curricular, instructional materials, and questions that incorporate aspects of spatial thinking.Item Fostering a Spatially Literate Generation: Explicit Instruction in Spatial Thinking for Preservice Teachers(2012-02-14) Jo, InjeongThis research proposes that the explicit incorporation of spatial thinking into teacher preparation programs is an effective and efficient way to foster and develop a spatially literate populace. The major objective of this study was to examine the effect of explicit instruction in spatial thinking on the development of preservice teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions toward teaching it. A one-day workshop - Teaching Spatial Thinking with Geography - for preservice geography teachers was developed as the intervention of this study. The primary focus of the workshop was to provide an explicit opportunity to learn about spatial thinking and to practice skills required to incorporate spatial thinking into participants' classrooms. Three assessments were used to examine changes in participants' knowledge, skills, and dispositions, before and after the workshop: the spatial concepts test, the teaching spatial thinking disposition survey, and participant-produced lesson plans. Individual interviews were conducted to obtain a deeper understanding of participants' learning experiences during the workshop. A mixed-method research design was adopted in which both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to offset the weaknesses inherent within one method with the strengths of the other. The major findings of this study include: 1) explicit instruction about spatial concepts is necessary to the development of preservice teachers' knowledge required for teaching spatial thinking through geography; 2) the skills development required to teach spatial thinking should be approached as the development of pedagogical content knowledge; 3) dispositions toward teaching spatial thinking should be differentiated from dispositions toward teaching general thinking skills; 4) although explicit instruction about teaching spatial thinking contributed substantially to the preservice teachers' acquisition of knowledge and skills and the development of positive dispositions toward teaching spatial, each of these components develops at a different rate but affect each other; and 5) a promising approach to the development of preservice teachers' pedagogical content knowledge would be to offer geography education courses, not general geography or methods courses, in which the focus is explicitly on teaching geography with an emphasis on spatial thinking.