Abstract
This paper centers on to evaluate whether and to what extent the learning objectives of the geography curricula emphasize students’ higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), and whether students are capable of answering to HOTS-questions by using the Finnish upper secondary geography education as an example. The revised Bloom’s taxonomy was used as a framework for the content analysis. The findings show that geography has the potential to enhance students’ HOTS, but students experience difficulties when answering to HOTS-questions. The results could be used to evaluate the desired thinking skills and knowledge dimensions in geography education for to enhance students meaningful learning.
Highlights
Higher-order thinking skills and geography educationThe last twenty years have seen discussion of the weakened position of geography in education, reflected, for example, in falling student intakes, decreased credit hours, and geography being seen as an umbrella subject, or as an optional subject in the curriculum
Researchers have noted that geography seems to have a general “body of knowledge” (Butt and Lambert 2014, 1) and a general understanding of geography education’s goals (Chang and Seow 2018, 32). Keeping these and the major changes that have occurred in the Finnish upper secondary education scene in mind, we suggest that Finland offers a good and interesting example of geography education
In examining the distribution of the different higher-order thinking skills and knowledge dimensions between the general learning objectives (LO) of geography and the course-specific LOs (Tables 3 and 4) in more depth, we found that HOTS were distributed more evenly between the different courses in the 2015 curriculum
Summary
The last twenty years have seen discussion of the weakened position of geography in education, reflected, for example, in falling student intakes, decreased credit hours, and geography being seen as an umbrella subject, or as an optional subject in the curriculum (see e.g. Bednarz, Heffron, and Solem 2014; Chang 2014; Lane and Bourke 2017; van der Schee, Notte, and Zwartjes 2010). The aim of this study is to evaluate whether and to what extent the learning objectives (LO) of geography curricula might emphasize students’ higher-order thinking skills, and whether students are capable of answering HOTS-type questions in both paper-based and digital tests. The purpose of this study is to analyze the geography objectives of the Finnish National Core Curricula for General Upper Secondary Schools published in 2003 and 2015 in terms of the levels of cognitive and knowledge domains of revised Bloom’s taxonomy, and to examine students’ higher-order cognitive outcomes in geography tests in the paper-based (between the autumn of 2015 and spring of 2016) and digital (between the autumn of 2016 and spring of 2017) forms. There were difficulties in using knowledge of methods about geographical information systems, planning a geographical research plan, or producing an altitude profile
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