Spatial Thinking and Cartography in Brazilian Middle School
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Duarte, R.
1UERJ Email: duarte.rg@gmail.com
Abstract
This research intends to analyze the contribution of cartography teaching in Brazilian middle school, mainly in Geography classes, for the development of student’s spatial thinking. The focus is the proficiency of the students regarding cartographic language, understood here as an instrumental tool to enhance the cognitive ability to understand the importance of spatial attributes that help to explain socio-spatial processes. The fundamental hypothesis is that the contribution of Brazilian geography education for the development of student’s spatial thinking in middle school (6th to 9th grades) has been very small. As an inseparable part of that hypothesis is the belief that this small contribution is strongly linked to poor use of maps between the 6th and 9th grades, both with regard to student's lack of expertise in cartographic language as regarding to its use as a resource to understand the spatiality of phenomena. Our theoretical foundation for this work is closely related to the field of the Spatial Thinking, as defined by the National Research Council Report, entitled “Learning to think spatially: GIS as a support system in the K-12 curriculum”, published in 2006: “Spatial thinking—one form of thinking— is based on a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning” (NRC, 2006, ix). Other cornerstones of our research are the works of Gersmehl (2007; 2008), Golledge (2002 and 2008) and Sarah Bednarz (2001, 2009, 2010, and 2011). We have proposed a methodology that was strongly based on the article of Lee and Bednarz (“Components of Spatial Thinking: Evidence from a Spatial Thinking Ability Test”, 2012) and on the article of Huynh and Sharpe (“An Assessment Instrument to Measure Geospatial Thinking Expertise”, 2013). These researchers were able to create tests to assess spatial thinking related to cartographic representations. All four researchers were kind enough to share the full versions of their tests and to grant their permission to use it Once our goal is to investigate the Brazilian reality, we have decided to design a test using parameters that could account both for the field of the spatial thinking as for the Brazilian middle school scenario. In order to do so we have set two cornerstones to guide the selection of the questions that would be part of the test. The first one is that there should be at least one question for each of the eight types of spatial thinking, according to Gersmehl (2008). The second criteria were that the questions should cover all the twelve itens listed in the fourth axis of the Brazilian National Standards for Geography in the 6th to 9th grades: “Cartography as an instrument to approach places in the world”. Considering this framework, we have selected eleven questions of Huynh and Sharpe’s test and five questions of Lee and Bednarz’s test. Besides that, we have designed four questions, based on the activities developed by Gersmehl (2008). Therefore, the final instrument became composed of twenty questions that were capable of covering our criteria. The final version of the test was named as “Cartographic Foundations of Spatial Thinking Assessment” and it was sent by email to Lee, Bednarz, Huyhn and Sharpe to ask for their final approval to use it. We haven’t finished our research yet, but the test has already been administered to 132 students, as a pre-test. Fifty two of them were students of the 6th grade, forty eight of the 9th grade and thirty students of the final year of high school (equivalent to 12th grade). The results are coherent with the grade level differences, but there are some discrepancies that seems to point out some problems in cartography teaching in Brazilian middle schools.
Keywords
School Cartography; Spatial Thinking; Geography Education