Young People’s Map Reading Skills in Flanders: What is the Status?
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Ooms, K.; 2de Maeyer, P.
1GHENT UNIVERSITY Email: kristien.ooms@ugent.be
2GHENT UNIVERSITY Email: philippe.demaeyer@ugent.be
Abstract
Although a rising trend in the popularity of maps and map use has been noticed, very little is known regarding the map reading skills of young people. The main aim of this study is to assess the map reading skills of pupils in secondary education in Flanders (compared with university students in Geography). In total, 528 participants took part in the user study, including 252 males, 270 females and 6 persons without any indication. From this pool of participants, 402 were pupils in secondary education and 126 studied at the Department of Geography, Ghent University (Flanders, Belgium). Every participant received the same set of documents, consisting of an introduction, a bundle of maps, a bundle of questions related to the maps and a questionnaire. All participants had to complete the set of questions related to the maps within the same time limit ( 10 minutes). Large-scale topographic maps (1 : 20 000 and 1 : 10 000) are sometimes used for assignments in the classroom, but also for leisure activities such as walking, cycling, locating points of interest and possibly in the context of youth club activities. Moreover, they contain a wide variety of cartographic elements with which the students should be familiar: scale, contour lines, visualization of roads, rivers, different categories of buildings, land cover and/or land use, etc. These elements were incorporated in the questionnaire to verify their level of expertise in map reading. In order to exclude a bias due to previous knowledge of the areas shown on the map, areas in the French community of Belgium were chosen. The questionnaire related to the map reading skills consisted of a cover page and 5 pages with 20 different multiple choice questions. All questions were asked in Dutch, the native language of the pupils and students who took part in the study. The questions were selected as such that different map reading skills were tested, taking into account the specific characteristics of topographic maps, such as contour lines. The goal of the strict time limit was twofold. First, with a limited time pupils would only be able to answer the questions they could solve easily. This way, the obtained results would be more pronounced regarding their acquired (map reading) skills. Second, the time limit makes the study more manageable and structured. Finally, in the post-study questionnaire, participants were asked to fill out certain personal characteristics: age, gender, study, colour blindness, dyslexia, familiarity with the depicted area, etc. The geography students performed, as expected, much better (about 70% correct answers): they are older than the pupils and moreover, maps and geography are situated in their field of interest and expertise. This expertise can also be situated in the region that was depicted: better results were obtained for pupils who indicated they knew the region. Therefore, education in geography is an important element that should not be neglected. The age of the pupils also turned out to be a determining factor on their map reading skills, which can be linked to education in cartography received in secondary education. In basic and secondary education, attention is paid to different learning outcomes pupils should obtain. Both males and females gave a similar number of correct answers but they used a different strategy to solve the questions, which could be related to the introduced time limit or pressure. Males worked more efficiently and could thus solve more questions (but not necessarily correctly). Females had a significant higher ratio of correct answers and thus solved the questions more effectively. The difference between both groups was not found in the results of the students. More research is needed to investigate the influence of the time limit on the obtained.
Keywords
Map Reading; Young People; Education