Search

Relational thinking is a necessary skill for building students' individual capabilities and a core concept in geography education. Geographical relational thinking refers to being able to give interrelated, causal explanations for geographical phenomena such as regional change. The aim of this study was to gain more insight into differences in relational thinking between small groups of students working together on an assignment to explain a regional event which was framed as a geographical mystery. This insight could help teachers to advance students' geographical relational thinking skills. Two geographical mysteries were examined with data from 69 small groups in Dutch upper secondary education. The two mysteries resulted in differences in the level of relational thinking, which were partly explained by small-groups' on-task behaviour. Many student groups showed a low level of geographical relational thinking. Findings point to the need to incorporate exercises into geography lessons which require the use of thinking and reasoning with interrelated causal relationships.

The project "3D and 4D Simulations for Landscape Reconstruction and Damage Scenarios: GIS Pilot Applications" has been devised with the intention to deal with the demand for research, innovation and applicative methodology on the part of the international programme, requiring concrete results to increase the capacity to know, anticipate and respond to a natural disaster. This project therefore sets out to develop an experimental methodology, a wide geodatabase, a connected performant GIS platform and multifunctional scenarios able to profitably relate the added values deriving from different geotechnologies, aimed at a series of crucial steps regarding landscape reconstruction, event simulation, damage evaluation, emergency management, multi-temporal analysis. The Vesuvius area has been chosen for the pilot application owing to such an impressive number of people and buildings subject to volcanic risk that one could speak in terms of a possible national disaster. The steps of the project move around the following core elements: creation of models that reproduce the territorial and anthropic structure of the past periods, and reconstruction of the urbanized area, with temporal distinctions; three-dimensional representation of the Vesuvius area in terms of infrastructuralresidential aspects; GIS simulation of the expected event; first examination of the healthcareepidemiological consequences; educational proposals. This paper represents a proactive contribution which describes the aims of the project, the steps which constitute a set of specific procedures for the methodology which we are experimenting, and some thoughts regarding the geodatabase useful to "package" illustrative elaborations. Since the involvement of the population and adequate hazard preparedness are very important aspects, some educational and communicational considerations are presented in connection with the use of geotechnologies to promote the knowledge of risk.

To start a teacher professional development programme on the relationship between classroom summative assessment and learning, the current practices and dispositions of geography teachers towards internal school-based examinations in pre-vocational education in the Netherlands were investigated. A questionnaire provided data on how teachers construct these examinations and how they perceive the extent to which they use test items in these examinations that appeal to distinct cognitive processes. The data were statistically analysed to explore teachers' practices regarding the construction of the examinations and the correlation with their perceptions on test items appealing to distinct cognitive processes. The results showed that teachers rarely construct test items themselves; instead, they rely to a considerable degree on test items created by outside sources. In particular, older teachers and teachers with greater teaching experience tend to use more test items from outside sources. According to the respondents, about two-thirds of the test items appeal to higher cognitive processes. When teachers do construct test items themselves, however, they perceive to use more test items that appeal to higher cognitive processes. Furthermore, teachers' dispositions regarding the purpose of the internal school-based examinations seem to be highly influenced by high-stakes tests, such as the national exam.

Teachers' classroom assessment practices tend to encourage rote learning instead of meaningful learning. To enhance teachers' classroom assessment practices, teacher involvement in assessment construction appears necessary. To foster teacher professional growth in relation to this issue, a professional development programme on summative assessment and meaningful learning in pre-vocational geography education in the Netherlands was designed. In 2016, a prototype of the programme was tested and evaluated in a small-scale case study. The results suggest that the programme was feasible and practical and contributed to change in teachers' knowledge, skills and practices.

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.

Geographical relational thinking is an important part of geographical thinking. This descriptive research was conducted to seek evidence on students' ability to establish geographical relationships which could help teachers to foster their geographical relational thinking. Sixty-nine small student groups from six secondary schools in the Netherlands were observed when solving a mystery. All relationships students established were analysed and the SOLO-taxonomy was used to analyse how coherent their solutions were. The results revealed that students had difficulties with complex, abstract and physical geographical relationships. A large proportion of the groups also had difficulties understanding the interdependence of the relationships. These findings underpin the usefulness of activities like mysteries which offer opportunities to practise, assess and teach geographical relational thinking in geography lessons.

Teachers should have the necessary assessment knowledge and skills to contribute to students' learning. This study provides insight into how a professional development program for teachers contributed to the achievement of higher mastery levels of assessment literacy. This study used Xu and Brown's TALiP (Teacher Assessment Literacy in Practice) framework to achieve these higher levels. To evaluate the extent to which teachers demonstrated professional growth regarding their assessment literacy, teachers' practices were evaluated through a content analysis of summative assessments. Potential changes in teachers' knowledge, skills, and beliefs were measured through questionnaires and interviews. The outcomes showed that reflection on educational goals and on teachers' beliefs, collaborative practice, and peer feedback played an important role in fostering higher mastery levels in assessment literacy. The outcomes of this study support the value of the TALiP framework and support the idea that professional growth could be fostered via diverse growth pathways.

Enhancing meaningful learning is an important aim in geography education. Also, assessment should reflect this aim. Both formative and summative assessments contribute to meaningful learning when more complex knowledge and cognitive processes are assessed. The internal school-based geography examinations of the final exam in pre-vocational secondary education in the Netherlands are an important test case to reveal the extent to which geography teachers construct examinations containing complex knowledge and cognitive processes. In this study, internal school-based examinations were analyzed based on a taxonomy table derived from a revision of Bloom's taxonomy and discussed with teachers and experts. The results of the content analysis showed that more than half of the test items in the internal school-based examinations are based on remembering knowledge, especially factual and conceptual geographical knowledge.

This paper describes the result of a design study in which a geography course was developed and tested aiming to develop the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of first-year primary student teachers. This resulted in a course called "Consciously Teaching Geography" with characteristics as (1) starting from students' preconceptions and everyday geographic experiences, (2) an underlying conceptual framework that incorporates key concepts of geography, (3) the use of active learning strategies and (4) explicit modelling to (5) leave room for reflection. Also room for the 'couleur locale' of the institute and the teaching style of the teacher educator proved necessary.

Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils' geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme -- named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) -- are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.

This study focused on designing a flood-risk education program to enhance 15-year-old students' flood-risk perception. In the flood-risk education program, learning processes were modeled in such a way that the arousal of moderate levels of fear should prompt experiential and analytical information processing. In this way, understanding of flood risk in the surroundings should prompt students' threat and coping appraisal. To accomplish this, the program consisted of a variety of student-directed parts, such as serious games and flood simulations. The design of the program was based on theoretical understandings from learning theory, information processing, and risk communication. Furthermore, empirical findings about students' risk perceptions were incorporated. The design process was guided by the principles of Educational Design Research and had an iterative character.

Until now various quantitative studies have shown that adults and students in the Netherlands have low flood risk perceptions. In this study we interviewed fifty 15-year-old students in two different flood prone areas. In order to find out how they think and reason about the risk of flooding, the mental model approach was used. Flood risk turned out to be not very salient and the mental models had a piecemeal character with fundamental misconceptions. Furthermore, the mental models consisted largely of descriptive concepts instead of concepts about underlying processes with respect to explaining and predicting flooding. Concepts with respect to hazard adjustments and disaster response were lacking most. Conclusions about how to use the results of this study in geography education were discussed.

This paper presents the findings of a study conducted among primary geography teacher educators. The research examines the perceptions of educators of primary teacher students' desired and achieved levels of substantial knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and beliefs about the subject of geography. The findings indicate that primary teacher educators do not view their students as having significant knowledge about geography. They believe their students have better syntactic knowledge and beliefs about the subject of geography, however. Teacher educators believe that more hours of teaching and more attention to subject knowledge could raise the quality of primary teacher training in geography.

The development of geographical reasoning is essential in geographical education. Strategies developed by the English "Thinking Through Geography" group (TTG) offer a promising approach to promote geographical reasoning. In the last decade, the TTG approach has become a regular element in geographical education in several countries. Research suggests that teachers acquainted with TTG do not always take full advantage of the possibilities of these strategies. The adoption of the TTG approach is explored ten years after its introduction in the Netherlands. Findings are presented of a survey conducted among Dutch geography teachers (N = 307) about the significance they assign to geographical reasoning and their use of TTG assignments. The results suggest that teachers use TTG selectively and adapt TTG assignments to fit them into existing practices and beliefs about students and teaching geography.

Ensuring the quality of investigations requires the understanding of procedures by which empirical evidence is obtained. This can be interpreted as becoming aware of and using criteria for evidence in one's mental structure. The question is whether this process can be observed in practice. In two schools for pre-university education where 11th grade students were working in small groups on open investigations in biology, all conversations in class -with or without the teacher participating- of eight groups (17 students) were audio-taped and transcribed. All utterances concerning the quality of investigations (3943 in total) were analyzed using five categories: problematization, description, explanation, generalization and application. Half of the students received written feedback twice, the other half paused their own investigations to carry out four specially designed reflection tasks. Talking about the reflection tasks as well as having the teacher present in conversations about investigations have shown to stimulate the spiral of description, explanation and generalization. Students who did the reflection tasks explained and generalized significantly more than students who did not. Still, the majority of the explanations and generalizations came from the teacher. Implications for the role of reflection and the role of the teacher in developing procedural understanding are discussed. (Contains 6 tables and 7 figures.)

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a kind of computer software that allows people to work with digital maps in a fast and flexible way. In the past decade, more and more geography teachers have become interested in the possibilities of using GIS in secondary education. However, teaching with GIS is complex, and little is known about how to do so in an optimal way. Therefore, an Educational Design Research study (EDR) was conducted with the aim to explore the characteristics of an optimal design for GIS-supported geographic inquiry projects. In this EDR study, a project was developed via progressive cycles of designing, testing, and evaluating, together with teachers from different schools. This paper summarizes the outcomes of the EDR study, and presents some design principles for GIS-supported inquiry-based geography education. Teachers could use these design principles to design and conduct GIS-supported geographic inquiry projects, and in such a way raise their geography lessons to a higher level. This paper also shows that although GIS provides many opportunities for enhancing inquiry-based geography projects, it also holds many conditions for its use to be optimal. GIS-supported inquiry-based geography education requires more than providing appropriate software, tasks, and coaching to ensure that students do not get stuck. In order to effectively raise students' geographic thinking to a higher level, the project should offer a considerable amount of guidance: it should include several preparatory and evaluative tasks based on a good domain-specific theory for use in educational settings. In addition, teachers should coach students in structuring, correcting, and expanding their geographic thinking via dialogical teaching. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

Given its active and enquiry-driven character, fieldwork is seen as an important way to develop geographical understanding of the world, during which cognitive and affective learning reinforce each other. The present study aims to give insight into whether and how secondary school geography teachers in the Netherlands succeed in using fieldwork as a rich and powerful teaching strategy. Do they perform fieldwork that is enquiry driven, structurally integrated in the curriculum and stimulates both cognitive and affective development? The results of a questionnaire show that although 71% of the geography teachers do fieldwork, they generally do not succeed in meeting the conditions mentioned above. (Contains 2 figures, 5 tables and 1 note.)

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. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)

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. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

A framework for teaching scientific inquiry in upper secondary chemistry education was constructed in a design research consisting of two research cycles. First, in a pilot study a hypothetical framework was enriched in collaboration with five chemistry teachers. Second, a main study in this community of teachers and researchers was conducted on the process of designing teaching scientific inquiry based on the enriched framework. Also, the enactment by five teachers and 80 students (age 17) of a designed inquiry module on "Diffusion: moving particles" was studied. This resulted in a theoretically and practically founded framework for teaching scientific inquiry, in which an iterative cycle of inquiry for students and a student inquiry community are essential. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

This design research describes the development of a student inquiry project in which upper-secondary school chemistry students learn domain-specific concepts by doing inquiry in a simulated inquiry community. The design of the inquiry project is based on the extended procedural and conceptual knowledge in science (PACKS) model; the student inquiry-learning process is considered to be cyclic and iterative. Five teachers collaborated and developed a student inquiry project, Diffusion: Moving Particles. An inquiry community of 80 upper-secondary school chemistry students (ages 16-17) at four schools was established. Our data show that implementing the project improved student understanding of domain-specific concepts. Key activities included: brainstorming; prediction, observation, and explanation in a demonstration experiment; doing a guided experiment; judging an example research article; creating an inquiry plan; and reporting the inquiry findings. We hypothesize that domain-specific student learning occurs because of the authentic character of the successive inquiry actions. Further research is needed on the impact on students' domain-specific learning when they participate in a real science research community. (Contains 1 table, 3 textboxes, and 4 figures.)

Geographic information systems (GIS) offer many possibilities for supporting student research projects. This paper deals with the results of the first phase of a design study on student research projects that combine (quantitative) data collection in the field with data visualisation, manipulation and analysis in GIS. In this study, we try to identify the characteristics of a successful design. In the first phase of the study, four student research projects that combine fieldwork with GIS were designed and tested. The design and test rounds were primarily focused at identifying the characteristics of feasible and potentially rich student research projects. On the basis of the design and test rounds, we identified five features of feasible student research projects that combine fieldwork with GIS. (Contains 5 figures.)

In our increasingly complex world, independent information collection is very important and with the help of modern technology this is becoming easier each day. However, it is very difficult if knowledge and training about how to structure information in a domain specific geographical way is missing. By "domain specific," we mean the coherence between declarative and procedural knowledge which is specific to the way of thinking in geography. This paper presents the results of a study in which Dutch geography teachers reflect on students' research papers in the upper divisions of secondary education. The present study shows that teachers have different opinions about the necessity of a more explicit way of coaching students in geographical thinking in order to improve the geographical structure of research papers. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile to investigate the possibility of designing a framework for geographical thinking on the quality of geography research papers. (Contains 5 tables and 6 figures.)

Since its inception in the early 1990s, geographic information science and its related technology, geographic information systems (GIS), have diffused slowly into select groups of K-12 classrooms worldwide. The technology has not been adopted at a rate commensurate with expectations. The purpose of this article is to explore GIS implementation by comparing the variable status of GIS education in pre-collegiate education in the United States and Europe and factors that appear to play a role in diffusion. The authors use a model of internal and external factors that influence adoption of education innovation as a heuristic to compare and draw conclusions. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

Expressing the desire that geography should be a more challenging subject that helps pupils to become better learners, a group of academic geographers and geography teachers from northeast England developed teaching strategies to stimulate pupils to think through geography. Teachers in England and the Netherlands report that these strategies are very successful because they make pupils think and generate motivation. This contribution focuses on an experiment in three Dutch lower secondary school classes. Thinking Through Geography strategies were tested in a pre-test and post-test control group design. All the students worked enthusiastically with the strategies, but there were big differences in the results between the schools. One of the key factors seems to be the role of the teacher. Although Thinking Through Geography strategies may be challenging for teachers and students, much greater attention needs to be given to the type of support that is required to make the change lasting and deep rather than superficial. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)

Describes a study that examined the problems Dutch secondary students encountered when conducting research projects and difficulties teachers faced when coaching students in research skills. Results indicated that problem finding was an underdeveloped skill in education. Although teachers score d much better than students on a test of research skills, finding an effective way to channel these skills into coaching methods to benefit students remained problematic. (SM)