Gender perspective: the spatial thinking of secondary education students

Abstract

Spatial thinking is defined as an inseparable aspect of geographical skills, the ability to make decisions from a set of choices of environmental conditions related to the needs of life. It is assumed that gender has a relationship with the geographical way of thinking of a person. Male and female have different perspectives on each decision making to assess and choose space both on the scale of rooms and on the surface of the earth. This study aims to determine the differences in spatial thinking based on gender in junior high school and senior high school students. The method used is descriptive. The data were collected through testing technique. The result shows that the correlation coefficient between gender and spatial thinking is not significant, but in some or certain cases there seems to be a slight difference. Men are more likely to think pragmatically about various situations that will occur in a narrow space and time, while women are more anticipatory in broader dimensions of time and space, such as time differences in various cities, season changes, and predictions of space threatened by natural disasters.