People navigate in various types of spaces, including indoor and outdoor environments. These differ in availability of navigational cues, such as distal landmarks, clear boundaries, and regular grid structures. Does learning the layout of different types of environments rely on the same or diverse cognitive abilities? Do separate measures of…

Given how commonly GPS is now used in everyday navigation, it is surprising how little research has been dedicated to investigating variations in its use and how such variations may relate to navigation ability. The present study investigated general GPS dependence, how people report using GPS in various navigational scenarios, and the…

School curricula as well as scientific literature emphasize the need of understanding how children navigate with maps. To date, however, there is no empirically validated assessment tool for analyzing navigational map reading competencies that can be used in map-based navigation tasks in the real-world. This paper fills this gap by presenting…

Orienteering is a sport that involves navigating. As navigation skills relate to individual visuospatial factors, it is worth examining whether practicing orienteering is associated with people's visuospatial abilities and wayfinding attitudes. A sample of 51 participants comprising three groups of 17 individuals with different orienteering…

The purpose of the current study is to examine the map reading skills of Social Studies pre-service teachers with orienteering, which is an activity-based and more active practice. To this end, a total of 10 students attending the Department of Social Studies Teaching in the Education Faculty of Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University and taking the…

The use of navigation applications changed the way people find their way in an unfamiliar environment. A combination of maps, images and textual route instructions shown (or with audio) on one screen guides the user to the destination but may sometimes be overwhelming. This article investigated the spatial knowledge participants acquired after…

Navigating campus and the surrounding community may pose barriers to matriculation, engagement, and quality of life for students with disabilities. This intervention uses the student's smartphone device and a university map application to guide students as they navigate to specific destinations around campus (e.g., library, classroom buildings,…

"Location and Transformation" skills are critical tools for navigating the world and establishing foundational steps for geometric reasoning associated with co-ordinate grids and the Cartesian plane. The contextual nature of using local landmarks to understand students' mental representation of large-scale space has the potential to…

The benefits of outdoor education are well known and irreplaceable. Teachers of environmental lessons frequently ask themselves what kind of cartographic support (paper maps or mobile navigators) to offer their students doing fieldwork either navigating to selected points or being engaged in the research of a selected environment. In this article,…

The aim of this study is to determine the awareness of primary teachers about the teaching of location and direction concepts. The study was designed according to a qualitative research model, and the data was collected through a semi-structured interview form developed by researchers consisting of open-ended questions. The study group consisted…

Map reading is unique to humans but is present in people of diverse cultures, at ages as young as 4 years old. Here, we explore the nature and sources of this ability and ask both what geometric information young children use in maps and what nonsymbolic systems are associated with their map-reading performance. Four-year-old children were given…

Research on animals, infants, children, and adults provides evidence that distinct cognitive systems underlie navigation and object recognition. Here we examine whether and how these systems interact when children interpret 2D edge-based perspectival line drawings of scenes and objects. Such drawings serve as symbols early in development, and they…

This case study focuses on a Native American family's experience on a walk in an urban forest preserve. Drawing on interaction analysis traditions, we analyze video data and transcript data to characterize how learning unfolds in place, in this case an urban forest. We build on this analysis, as well as the work of Indigenous scholars, to…

The current study examined phonetic convergence when talkers alternated roles during conversational interaction. The talkers completed a map navigation task in which they alternated instruction Giver and Receiver roles across multiple map pairs. Previous studies found robust effects of the role of a talker on phonetic convergence, and it was…

In the current educational climate, where clearly articulated learning objectives are required, it is clear that the spontaneous teachable moment still has its place. Authors Ann Williams and Thomas Davinroy think that instructors from almost any discipline can employ Google Earth as a tool to take advantage of teachable moments through the…