Abstract
We conducted a standardized spatial thinking ability test (STAT) to examine the spatial thinking abilities of a group of Chinese undergraduates with a focus on their spatial reasoning, which is a very important component of critical spatial thinking. The college subject of human geography in China is often geared toward the preparation of students for government consultancy and policy-making tasks, known as the “tasks leading disciplines” (renwu dai xueke), where the pedagogies are problem-solving based and sustainability centered. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has become the universal tool for problem solving in geography and other areas, thus human geography in this situation gives us a context to test and investigate whether and to what extent GIS implementation is able to improve undergraduate spatial thinking levels. Our comparative analysis reported the marginally significant difference of STAT test scores between GIS application (geoinformation group) and its control group (geography group without GIS training). It was also found that the Chinese students performed the spatial reasoning better in this test than American participants as reported in prior study, displaying their higher spatial cognition in terms of problem solving and Boolean logics. Futhermore, a strong negative correlation was reported between STAT test scores and final exam rank. It is possible that the higher geography education in a context of China may not fully embrace the spatial thinking capacity as the strategic goal. The results can help us to better understand the Oriental and Western gaps in higher geography education. Policy suggestions are given in the conclusion.
Highlights
There has been a steady growth of interest in a series of geospatial technologies including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) learning and big data use in human geography pedagogy, which is essential to enhance the spatial thinking skills that uncover knowledge that is socially and spatially situated [1,2]
The research by Golledge et al and Lee and Bednarz has laid the foundation for a standardized test on spatial thinking ability, which is acknowledged by the Association of American Geographers and is widely used in a context of geography teaching [8,9,10]
Based on such a local vs. international comparative human geography course, this paper examines whether and how an Anglo-Saxon human geography textbook integrated with GIS problem solving exercises can generate a better performance of students’ spatial thinking ability than a content-based Chinese teaching strategy
Summary
There has been a steady growth of interest in a series of geospatial technologies including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) learning and big data use in human geography pedagogy, which is essential to enhance the spatial thinking skills that uncover knowledge that is socially and spatially situated [1,2]. Our empirical study tries to fill this gap through the comparative assessment of a spatial thinking ability test (STAT) [9,10] in a human geography course with two sections at Capital Normal University (CNU) in Beijing, China, where the geography (Section 1) and geoinformation (Section 2) students participated in either a content-based (Section 1) or GIS-based (Section 2) instruction, and in either a local Chinese textbook (Section 1) or Anglo-Saxon (Section 2) textbook adoption This kind of Chinese-English dual curriculum project in the undergraduate human geography courses is an important part in the Internationalization Demonstration School Plan in the College of Geospatial Information Science and Technology (CGIST) of CNU, which is managed and funded by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs and the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. We will briefly review the literature in the spatial thinking together with the “critical” spatial thinking development through GIS tools, its effects on the human geography courses were rarely recorded before
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