Evaluating Progression in Students’ Relational Thinking While Working on Tasks with Geospatial Technologies

Abstract

One of the facets of geographic literacy is the ability to think in a structured way about geographic relationships. Geospatial technologies offer many opportunities to stimulate students’ geographic relational thinking. The question is: How can these opportunities be effectuated? This paper discusses the results of a process-oriented experiment that aimed to gain insight into the characteristics of students’ learning processes and the factors that influence students’ learning when they work with geospatial technologies, and to provide ideas on how to optimise the learning outcomes. Eighteen students were observed in a laboratory research setting while working on tasks with a geogame and a WebGIS, and were interviewed about their learning afterwards. The study shows that using appropriate educational technologies is only part of the story. Well-designed tasks and active coaching by the teacher also seem to be indispensable ingredients. The data suggest that, in order to increase the effectiveness of instruction methods with geospatial technologies, teachers should include tasks in which students have to summarize their system knowledge in a conceptual framework, and that teachers should help students structure their system knowledge via dialogical teaching. In the tasks and support, attention should be paid to the grammar of relational thinking.