The Integration of GIS into Geography Instruction to Enhance High School Students’ Spatial Thinking Ability
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Wang, Chung-An
Abstract
Spatial literacy, or the ability of spatial thinking, has been considered as an important literacy for citizens in modern society and also the core issue of geography education. When it comes to the method to enhance students’ spatial thinking ability, GIS (Geographic Information System) has been recognized as a suitable tool and increasingly adopted in high school geography course. In Taiwan, although a few studies have been conducted about spatial thinking, they mainly focused on students in colleges or universities instead of high schools. Some other studies were made about relationship between spatial thinking and GIS, but the number of student samples in such research were limited. Accordingly, this research aims to discuss the challenges and opportunities to enhance spatial thinking ability in high school education in Taiwan. First, this research examined how the existing geography textbooks introduced spatial concepts in high school. Secondly, interviews were made with high school geography teachers regarding how they used the current textbooks to teach spatial thinking in classes. Based on the analysis above, this research further developed a teaching experiment by creating new teaching material that integrated GIS tools. Finally, this research interviewed the students to understand the pros and cons of the new teaching module. The main research findings were as follows: 1.The existing textbooks have introduced a lot of concepts about spatial thinking, but a systematic teaching module was lacking. 2. After using the new teaching material with GIS tools, students’ performances in graphic test were significantly improved. 3. Although the above-mentioned results are similar to previous research abroad, this research contributed to a better understanding about the possibilities to increase students’ learning about spatial thinking in Taiwan particularly under the condition to cope with the stress of the College Entrance Exam.
Subjects
spatial thinking
GIS (Geographic Information System)
spatial concept
teaching experiment
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-104-R02228023-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):80ebc0a4aeee7fd46e9d6bee55965c83