Little that occurs in contemporary academic geography will surprise members of the National Association of Scholars, for a large part of the field has joined the other humanities and social sciences in the bawdy saloon of progressive politics, cultural nihilism, and subjective epistemology. That geographers are in there roistering with the…

When teacher education programs in Turkey are scrutinized in detail, it can be seen that geography education is included in the teacher training programs of Geography, Primary School, and Social Studies. These programs aim to provide field knowledge, general culture, and field teaching skills. The success of geography teaching depends on defining…

Both "teaching" and "teaching" with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are "wicked problems," in the sense that they involve multiple variables that interact with one another. Effective teaching calls for both learning with understanding and transfer. The authors' own experience implementing a geography and…

A spatial-skills test is used to examine the effect of GIS learning on the spatial thinking ability of college students. Eighty students at a large state university completed pre- and post- spatial-skills tests administered during the 2003 fall semester. Analysis of changes in the students' test scores revealed that GIS learning helped students…

One of the goals of international education is to help students learn about different regions of the world. Such education is inherently multidisciplinary, including geographical and historical perspectives to put the places and regions in spatial, ecological, and temporal context. A wide variety of systematic disciplines also can be involved in…

This paper explores some of the unique opportunities and challenges of integrating participatory action research into undergraduate GIS courses, drawing evidence from two undergraduate courses that contributed to a long-term participatory action research project. The author shows that incorporating participatory action research in undergraduate…

The "Foundations" (English/language arts, mathematics, social emotional skills, approaches to play and learning, science, social studies, creative arts, and physical health and growth) are Indiana's early learning development framework and are aligned to the 2014 Indiana Academic Standards. This framework provides core elements that…

The utilization of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geobrowsers (Google Earth) have become increasingly prevalent in the study of genocide. These applications offer teachers and students the opportunity to analyze historical and contemporary genocidal acts from a critical geographic perspective in which the confluence of historical…

Within Britain, geography as a discipline has been criticized recently for failing either to add to or teach knowledge about the world at large. Instead it has concentrated first at university and then in schools on spatial social science, with examples drawn overwhelmingly from the white Western world. The recent history of geography is reviewed…

Geography teaching has been under constant change over the last decades. Innovations from research in geography and higher education have diffused in school practices in various ways. International trends have been applied to national contexts in co-operation among academics, administrators and school teachers depending on policies and educational…

Debate over the use of cross-curricular or subject-based approaches in planning and teaching in primary schools has taken place for many decades. Geography is frequently seen as a subject which lends itself easily to being taught in a cross-curricular fashion, but is often first to suffer if planning is nebulous rather than precise. A…

The usefulness of geography knowledge in a child's education is philosophically analyzed from two perspectives: (1) what geography knowledge should U.S. schools be teaching?; and (2) is there agreement about what types of geographical knowledge U.S. schools should teach? Only geographical knowledge that will be useful in life should be taught to…

The Michigan Elementary Geography Test (MEGT) was completed by 1,689 fifth-grade students in 64 classrooms from 20 school districts in Michigan. This article provides representative questions from MEGT and presents data regarding student performance on these questions. (Author/RM)

Introductory college level geography textbooks can be enhanced by using scatter diagrams and double criteria classifications, both of which reveal generalizations and specific facts about location. Scatter diagrams, a series of dots on a graph, illustrate relationships among phenomena that covary, e.g., national birth and infant mortality rates.…

This resource paper on geographical spatial diffusion is part of a series designed to supplement undergraduate geography courses. Focusing on the unfolding of man's patterns over geographic space and through time, the paper provides the basic theoretical background of this new, rapidly growing area of geography. Following a short introductory…