A problem that history teachers in the United States face is that they lack an appropriate reference point from which to address many of today's global issues. The source of this problem is an antiquated model of society, still taught in the universities, that largely reflects the society that existed a century ago. For the last decade, the author…

Americans thrive on competition. But American schools have been suspicious of competition for generations, and are generally horrified by the idea that success should be accompanied by a reward like a title, a trophy, or a cash prize. In this article, the author stresses that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish…

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low…

The purpose of this study is to determine the place of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in teaching geography, the general level of secondary school students' attitudes towards Geography Information Systems and whether this changes according to different variables. The population of the research consists of the students studying in Istanbul,…

This paper critically reviews the use of video documentaries in the assessment of human geography field courses. It aims to contribute to recent debates about the role of visual methods for developing active and deep learning in student-centred teaching. Based on four days of group work in Crete, 30 third-year students produced individual…

This article addresses how teachers in a specific developing world context interpreted a curriculum reform initiative. It is located within a broader interpretive study that investigated the integration of Environmental Education into the formal education system of Lesotho with particular reference to secondary school geography. More specifically…

This study identified five subdimensions of spatial habits of mind--pattern recognition, spatial description, visualization, spatial concept use, and spatial tool use--and created an inventory to measure them. In addition, the effects of GIS learning on spatial habits of mind were investigated. Pre- and post-tests were conducted at the beginning…

This document provides the framework to guide the development of the assessment instruments for the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in geography. Altogether, four documents will be designed to guide the geography assessment and this Assessment Framework is the first. This framework is designed to assess the outcomes of…

This article is about the images of economic space that are found in school curricula. It suggests the importance for educators of evaluating these representations in terms of the messages they contain about how social processes operate. The article uses school geography texts in Britain since the 1970s to illustrate the different ways in which…

Research on the utility of student evaluations to measure teaching effectiveness of university professors could be the largest body of work conducted on pedagogy in the academe. The literature suggests that student evaluations are valid and reliable measures of effective teaching and student learning. Unfortunately, while there have been many…

This paper examines to what extent the participation of researchers in transnational academic mobility, their experiences and perceived outcomes vary by gender. Based on longitudinal statistics, original survey data and semi-structured interviews with former visiting researchers in Germany, the paper shows that the academic world of female…

The Personal Inquiry project is an investigation into the role that technologies can play in enabling effective inquiry. While it is generally agreed that inquiry-based learning has potential for student learning, especially in science, three main challenges remain. The first is to provide effective support for inquiry learning, for both students…

In the spring of 2007, approximately 50 undergraduate introductory geography students in Papua New Guinea and the United States participated in a four-week international collaboration using the nationalism module available from the Association of American Geographers' Center for Global Geography Education. This paper reports on the challenges and…

The links between research and teaching have been the subject of much debate and controversy over the need for both activities to take place in universities remains current. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a research placement module, which aimed to provide opportunities for students to work as research assistants on…

This article reports the results of a small-scale curriculum development project focusing on two of the seven "key concepts" identified in the revised Key Stage 3 (KS3) National Curriculum programme of study for geography, introduced into schools in 2007. The study used "interdependence" and "physical processes" as…