This curriculum unit teaches students about the basic physical and political geography of Africa and introduces or reviews fundamental geographical concepts and vocabulary in an African context. The unit offers a geographic introduction to the map of Africa with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa in terms of its examples and information. Each of the…

This curriculum unit teaches students about the basic physical and political geography of Asia and introduces or reviews fundamental geographical concepts and vocabulary in an Asian context. Each of the unit's five lessons can be integrated into the curriculum where it best suits students' needs, but it is suggested that the unit be taught as a…

These lessons, designed for high school classrooms, focus on the country of Germany in teaching the five themes of geography (location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region). The lessons can be used individually via integration into the curriculum or collectively used as a complete stand-alone unit. The lessons are desigend…

Recent state-level curriculum frameworks have emphasized geography and history as core subjects of the social studies sequence of courses, from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. This Digest presents a rationale for the connection between geography and history, presents ideas for developing this connection within the curriculum, and…

This document is the second of two reports of the findings of the 1991 "Sciences...humaines" Assessment for grades 8 and 10 conducted in Franco-Manitoban schools and in French immersion programs in Manitoba, Canada. The report on the French immersion course is presented in parallel French and English versions, and a separate report, in…

This text examines India's rich and long history, then uses this perspective to focus on present day problems and aspirations. It forces students to reevaluate their stereotyped images of India by presenting a nation that has striven to recover from a past of colonial domination, is presently faced with regional ethnic discord and disparity, and…

As a step toward acquiring international measures of geographic competence of students, an optional geography component was included in the second International Assessment of Educational Progress. Nine of the 20 countries participating in the assessment included the geography component, including 8 provinces. In each country a representative…

Presented and discussed is a model which can be used by educators who want to develop an interdisciplinary map skills program in geography and mathematics. The model assumes that most children in elementary schools perform cognitively at Piaget's concrete operational stage, that readiness for map skills can be assessed with Piagetian or…

A wealth of unpublished or unstructured educational materials for all aspects of cartographic instruction are widely dispersed and unnecessarily difficult to obtain. The Cartography Assistance Brochures Project of the Cartography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the North American Cartographic Information Society,…

An approach to teaching geography and social studies in elementary schools that is based on integrating theories of learning into the classroom experience is presented. Specifically, the approach described utilizes essential thinking skills and Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognition in a question-asking framework to be used with literary selections.…

This issue of Update contains four separate geography lesson plans on the topics of: (1) the mobility and interactions of people, goods, and ideas; (2) creating thematic maps and comparing the relative wealth of South American countries; (3) identifying and applying key geographic concepts; and (4) human-environment interactions. Each lesson plan…

Statistics representing social and economic conditions in 125 developed and developing countries with populations of more than one million are presented. The booklet presents a series of maps, charts, graphs and tables representing separate sections on life expectancy, adult literacy rate, population growth rate, gross national product per capita,…

This study investigates the role of textbooks in secondary geography instruction. In chapter 1, the origins and purpose of this study are outlined, and chapter 2 is a literature review of English and U.S. research that mentions geography textbooks while focusing specifically on content analysis. Chapter 3 outlines the broad case study approach…

Four lessons for secondary school geography instruction focus on creative thinking through generating alternatives, imagining consequences, generating analogies, and creating products. In lesson 1 students lay out alternatives to solving a problem and decide the best course of action. Suggested activities include consideration of alternatives in…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. The eight papers in the pamphlet were drawn from a seminar involving 11 geography, history, and English teachers and are concerned with…