Geographic Literacy Research Articles

Improving Geographic Literacy among First-Year Undergraduate Students: Testing the Effectiveness of Online Quizzes

To make sense of spatial data, information and concepts strong geographic literacy skills are a prerequisite, yet existing studies suggest a global decline in these skills. Current geographic tools predominantly focus on mapping tasks that do not necessarily lead to an understanding of the broader geographic relevance of location. This article argues that in order to improve geographic literacy exercises should test an understanding of location and employ techniques to correct deficiencies. To support this argument this study offers evidence on the effectiveness of online quizzes in improving geographic literacy skills of first-year undergraduate geography students.

Geographic Literacy and Defoe's Complete Englishmen: Mere Bookcases v. Walking Maps

AbstractWhether learning how to work the streets as a pickpocket or picking up the art of navigation, Daniel Defoe's characters find, in John Richetti's words, that ‘the exact apprehension of the world is a technique for survival’: a measure of their capacity for ‘pushing back against a potentially destructive world’. This article pursues this issue of apprehension beyond Defoe's novels and into his non‐fictional explorations of model lives, where geographic literacy or competence often figures as an index of the capacity to act effectively and responsibly in the world.

Teaching A Geographical Component In World History Curriculum

This article is devoted to the topic of teaching a geographical component in World History curriculum in American public high schools. Despite the fact that the federal legislation entitled No Child Left Behind (2001) declared geography as a "core" academic subject, geography was the only subject dropped from federal funding. As a result, geography as a separate subject in the majority of public schools around the country ceased to exist. California, New Mexico, and Rhode Island have adopted state standards of combined course of World History and Geography. However, a small geography segment included within the World History course has not been sufficient to provide students with a satisfactory level of geographical literacy. American students show their lack of geographical knowledge in one study after another even though the 21st century is an era of globalization and increasing international relationship. The geopolitical approach to teaching the World History course promoted in this paper can improve the situation significantly in a relatively short period of time. This geopolitical approach stresses the connection between history and geography. It involves an analysis of a countys economy, culture, domestic and foreign policies as directly connected to its geography. This approach improves students analytical thinking and conceptual understanding.

Teaching for Geographic Literacy: Our Afterschool Geography Club

This research describes how enrolling students in an afterschool Geography Club affects their perception of the discipline and their geographic literacy. The creation of the afterschool club at this particular school came out of the recognition of the need to increase students’ exposure to geographical content. The results of this study show the following improvements in students’ geographic literacy when they experience an increased exposure to geographic content: place recognition, application of geographic theory, establishment of connections between geographic facts and the students’ daily lives, and awareness of other cultures. The emergence of such patterns confirms the benefits that can be derived from enhancing students’ geographic literacy.

Developing Visualization Tools for Geographic Literacy in a Museum Exhibit: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration

As a result of reduced formal instruction and reduced direct experience in the natural environment, students suffer from a deficiency in geographic literacy. Informal learning environments, such as a model railroad exhibit at a history museum, can be exploited to introduce key geographic concepts (e.g., scalar compression, landscape transformations, and human-environment interaction). Presented here are historically and geographically accurate visualization tools developed via community collaboration across disciplines (geography/education) and institutions (university/museum/community volunteers). This article highlights geographic learning that takes place in informal education settings.

Putting together the pieces of the puzzle: Traces of New Zealand in international school geography textbooks

How does a fairly remote space (the islands of New Zealand) contribute to the development of geographical literacy in the geography textbooks of post-socialist (Romania), Western (Germany) and post-colonial (Mexico) countries? A four-step analysis of three textbooks of international selection revealed different regionalisation cultures combined with traditional and recently implemented educational paradigms of geography education and led to a similar result. Despite the many ways in which New Zealand's geographical distinctiveness could be used to enhance geographical literacy, there are few operationalisations of educational targets that might contribute to sustainable long-term learning. Further, these results also offer a possible explanation for the absence of the ‘southern lands’ on students' cognitive maps of the world.

Utilizing Google Earth to Teach Students about Global Oil Spill Disasters

ABSTRACT The United States is currently experiencing its worst man-made environmental disaster, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is severe in its impact, but it is only one of several global oil spill disasters in history. Students can utilize the technology of Google Earth to explore the spatial and temporal distribution of oil spills. In addition to increasing content knowledge of oil spills, Google Earth assists in developing student geographic and technologic literacy. Designed for a middle school science class, this activity may also be used in English, history, math, art, and poster-making.

Some thoughts about a new international geography test

An important question for geography teachers all over the world is how to define, stimulate and test geographic literacy. Although modern technology is no guarantee of quality, it offers new possibilities for teaching and testing, as can be seen in contemporary geography learning/teaching units using digital maps and interactive tests. Tests such as the International Geography Olympiad and the Dutch GEA test for geographic literacy are starting points for an international discussion about the quality of geography teaching and for the development of a new international geography test.

Multimedia tests and geographical education: the 2008 International Geography Olympiad

Although there is a widespread interest in testing in geography, very few empirical studies exist of internationally validated testing models. Arguably the best international geography test in secondary education is found in the International Geography Olympiad, and this test is the focus of this paper. Apart from a written response test and fieldwork assignments, the International Geography Olympiad includes a multimedia test. This paper analyzes the results of the multimedia test of the 2008 International Geography Olympiad. Although the validity of the test is good, the performance of students on individual questions is open to a variety of interpretations. Tests such as the multimedia test can be used to assess the geographical literacy of students in the upper levels of secondary education, and this point is extended in the final section of the paper that promotes international benchmarking and improvements to the testing protocol.

Geographic media literacy: an introduction

In a media saturated world of globalization, information flow and knowledge economies, an interesting paradox exists: geographic literacy appears to be on the decline while geographic information is on the rise. In this introduction to a collection of essays on geographies of the media, we explore this paradox and use Baudrillard’s (1994) work on Simulacra and Simulation to argue that increased mediated information does not produce more meaning, but rather leads to a catastrophe of meaning and the medium. Drawing from McLuhan’s axiom, “the medium is the message,” we posit that with more mediated information there is less meaningful information and as such we need to address geographic media literacy as a primary mode through which to address geographic literacy.

Geographical Literacy and the Role of GIS

Geographical Literacy and the Role of GIS

Making Sense of Place: Sarah’s Story

Written from the vantage point of both a mother and teacher educator, the author recounts the journey taken by Sarah, her 4-year old daughter, as she is introduced to and explores map making as a means of representing and making sense of familiar and unfamiliar places. Offering Sarah’s experience as context, the author offers both a practical and theoretical discussion of children’s emerging geographic literacy, its relationship to identity development and the importance of understanding children’s experience and socio-emotional development to inform pedagogy.

The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity (review)

The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity. By Martin Bruckner. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 276. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.99; Paper, $22.50.)Reviewed by Mark JaedeMartin Bruckner, a literary scholar, has produced a fascinating study of geographic knowledge and representation in early America. Though book is informed by long tradition of geographically based history - ranging from Frederick Jackson Turner to William Cronon - it takes a new approach. Using tools of history and literary study, Bruckner has crafted a history of geographic and geographic texts. It is not a study of relationships between people and land, but of relationships among people, texts, and nation.Bruckner construes and broadly. He examines not only atlases, novels, diaries, geographies, and spelling books but also portraits, plats, and geographic decorations on household objects. He spends as much time on map cartouches as on maps themselves. He argues that geographic images and symbols, alongside the Word, were metaphoric building blocks with which Americans constructed and transmitted their sense of self and community.From these texts, Bruckner derives two central arguments. The first is more conventionally historical. He details a rapidly increasing geographic awareness, or literacy, between about 1690 and 1820. Drawing not only from texts, but also from data on publication, sales, book ownership, school curricula, and surveying practices, Bruckner traces how geographic knowledge changed from being property of a small elite to part of daily culture of masses of Americans.In this area, Bruckner's work is convincing. His opening chapter relates how late colonial expansion led to a huge demand for surveying land claims and describing them in plats. The ability to imagine, delineate, depict, and describe land - in short, to practice geography - was a necessary and practical skill acquired by many. Moreover, plats themselves formed a huge body of geographic texts that colonists consulted frequently as they bought and resold properties. Subsequent chapters show use of geographic imagery in revolutionary political rhetoric, massive popularity of geographies as textbooks in new republic, and influence of geographical thinking on memoirs and fiction. Bruckner's case for a revolution of geographic understanding is overwhelming.His second argument is more literary. Reading critically into texts, he finds evidence of an emerging mindset. He argues that language of geography shaped a new American national identity based on a sense of place and on an ideology of spatial expansion. By 1820s, Bruckner claims, the expansionist policies of nation-state become applied expression of American public's everyday geographic literacy (262). …

Multi-Scaffolding Environment: An Analysis of Scaffolding and its Impact on Cognitive Load and Problem-Solving Ability

A Multi-Scaffolding Environment (MSE) is a multimedia environment reliant on authentic scaffolding. We examine the impact of the availability of multiple scaffolds on learning and cognitive load within an MSE where learners are assigned a real-world task and given access to four support tools to help them complete the task. By examining an MSE in the area of geographic literacy, we explore the effectiveness of problem-based learning and whether multiple scaffolding is applicable to any content area. Quantitative and qualitative data indicate that a learner-controlled multi-scaffolding approach may be a valuable approach in problem-based learning contexts.

The Geographic Revolution in Early America; Maps, Literacy, and National Identity

rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among non elite Americans. In a path breaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres significantly influenced the formation of identity in from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

Efforts to Increase Awareness of the Importance of Geography: Focusing on National Geographic-led Geographic Literacy Campaign

Efforts to Increase Awareness of the Importance of Geography: Focusing on National Geographic-led Geographic Literacy Campaign

Suggested Geographic Information Literacy for K-12

Geographic information literacy (GIL) is defined as the possession of concepts, abilities and habits of mind that allow an individual to understand and use geographic information properly. This paper reports the results of an online survey undertaken to get expert input into specifying the concepts and abilities associated with GIL that should be in the K-12 curriculum to ensure coverage of geographic information skills required to be literate in an information society. The survey differentiates traditional geographic information literacy, general information literacy, and digital geographic information literacy. Replies from respondents (N = 80) were used to classify and rank GIL concepts and abilities.

MapStats for Kids: Making Geographic and Statistical Facts Available to Children

Statistical and geographical literacy is essential for our daily lives. A new web portal for middle school students, published on the federal government statistics website, supports geographic and statistical education by providing age-appropriate online learning activities that teach how to use statistical summaries and their graphic representations. The content of the learning activities is closely related to the National Geography Standards and the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. On average, the web portal receives 300 visitors per day.

Makabayan Curriculum for Secondary Schools in the Philippines: The Development of Citizenship

The Department of Education in the Philippines has undertaken initiatives to restructure the curriculum for secondary schools as part of its ongoing effort to improve the quality of learning. After a decade of study, the Department produced a new basic education curriculum, as the 2002 Basic Education Curriculum. All public schools in the country were mandated to implement the curriculum at the start of 2002–2003 school year. Makabayan (nationalistic or patriotic) is one of the learning areas in the Basic Education Curriculum along with English, Filipino, Science and Mathematics. Makabayan from First to Fourth Year is designed to develop the personal, social and work special skills of learners especially their interpersonal skills, empathy with other cultures, vocational efficiency, problem-solving, and decision-making in daily life, that is, to develop socio-cultural and politico-economic literacy. This paper describes the context and content of the Makabayan curriculum and the extent to which it develops in learners a sense of citizenship, that is, a healthy personal and national self-concept. To delimit scope, this paper focuses on the study of geography only as one of the components of Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies) in the secondary school Makabayan Curriculum, using the results of a study of third year high school students' learning of geographic knowledge and skills as bases of empirical data. Key Words: citizenship, geographic literacy and competency, Makabayan curriculum, secondary education

Geographic Literacy and Young Learners

Geographic Literacy and Young Learners