Spatial Thinking in High-School Education: A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Geography Textbooks- A Case Study of the Climate
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Wu, Chih-Ying
Abstract
Spatial thinking is a new trend about global education. In 2006, National Research Council (NRC) stressed the importance of spatial thinking skills in Learning to Think Spatially, research on the education of spatial thinking gradually increased thereafter. As a spatial science, geography should emphasize more on the importance of spatial thinking. Textbook is one of the indispensable materials during teaching process.American scholars have studied the integration of spatial thinking in high school and college textbooks, but except America, related studies in other countries are very limited. As a result, this thesis conducts a cross-country analysis of high school geography textbooks. In order to understand how the editors present the concept of spatial thinking and design students’ activities in the chapter of climate, this study tried hard to examine the words and the illustrations which are presented in the textbooks. In this paper, high school textbooks of Taiwan, China, Japan and England are chosen to be the study objects. Yet, the chapters among these countries’ textbooks are not exactly the same. Since the concepts of climate are the basic knowledge of general theory of Geography and it is also one of the most important concept in regional geography, and the content of the chapter, climate, implies a lot of spatial thinking, such as the planetary wind system and frontal surface. Therefore, climate became the case study in this paper. The finding shows that the concept of spatial thinking has been presented in over 50% content of each version of textbooks. Besides, the designs of students’ activities in the textbooks can examine students’ abilities of spatial thinking. Most of them use the concepts of directions or movements to explain the fundamental principles of climat. Therefore, editors can pay more attention on highlighting the concepts of directions and movements in the textbooks, or observe carefully how other versions explain the same concepts of climate. In class, teachers should notice how the fundamental principles of climate are explained by the concepts of directions and movements. They can also encourage students to use spatial thinking to think about the spatial issues in climate.The result of this study provided an abundance of valuable information for the subsequent researches. Geographic scholars or educators can refer to the ways of presenting spatial thinking in different version of textbooks which were put into order during this study.
Subjects
Geography education
textbook
Spatial Thinking
Cross-country comparisons
Content Analysis
Type
thesis
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