present - Commission on Geographical Education

THE USE OF GIS IN
GEOGRAPHICAL EDUCATION IN
PORTUGAL: A CASE OF TRUE
INNOVATION, OR A TOOL TO
DISGUISE ANCIENT PRACTICES? Fernando ALEXANDRE
Branca MIRANDA
KRAKOW, August 2014
Assumptions
!  GIS (as part of Geospatial technologies) is a stimulating tool for geographical
education at all instruction levels, because it can encourage the development of new
teaching and learning methodologies;
!  The use of GIS should be seen as a means of engaging students in a variety of
learning activities, through which they might develop higher-level skills (e.g. selection,
analysis, synthesis and evaluation) and operate a broad range of cognitive processes;
!  The use of GIS in geography lessons enhances students’ spatial thinking (e.g. helping
them to ask spatial questions, to visualise spatial and non-spatial data, and to perform
spatial analysis);
!  The use of GIS in the classroom emphasizes the need to rethink the development of
the geography curricula and to design new lesson plans and materials (e.g. in order to
increase students’ interaction and to incorporate problem-solving approaches).
Objective and Framing questions
!  To assess the actual contribution of GIS to change, both epistemologically and
pedagogically, the nature of the geographical knowledge taught to students attending
lower secondary education in Portugal.
a)  What kind of learning activities are conceived in order to engage students in the
use of GIS?
b)  In what way do such learning activities contrast with the ones already available
through other educational resources (e.g. textbooks, online handouts, powerpoint presentations)?
c)  To what extent the use of existing GIS activities helps to develop students’ spatial
thinking and higher-level cognitive skills?
The GIS resources
!  The research assessed the GIS learning resources available in GEORED (a joint
project involving the Portuguese Association of Geography Teachers and the
Centre of Studies on Geography and Spatial Planning - University of Lisbon,
supported by the Ministry of Education and Science):
GEORED
!  At present, the website lodges more than one hundred GIS/ICT resources (e.g. lesson
plans, software, databases), that every teacher can use free of charge.
Available GIS resources (7th, 8th and 9th grades)
Geored offers 62 learning activities:
!  Use of maps (e.g. elements, scale, orientation, map reading) — 24%
!  Population (e.g. distribution, demographic indicators) — 20%
!  Use of software (e.g. Google Earth) — 15%
• 
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• 
• 
• 
• 
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Weather and climate
Settlement
Landforms
Human migrations
Location of places
Agricultural systems
Tectonics, earthquakes and volcanoes
Energy resources
The taxonomic contents’ analysis of the learning activities
Knowledge
dimension
Cognitive
domain
Remembering
Understanding
Applying
Analysing
Evaluating
Creating
Facts
Concepts
Processes
Procedures
Principles
Metacognitive
Results — taxonomic contents’ analysis
The
knowledge
dimension
Remembering
Understanding
Applying
Analysing
Evaluating
Creating
Facts
Define,
identify
Distinguish
Classify
Select
—
—
Concepts
Recall
Explains
Compute
Differentiate
—
—
Processes
Outline
Estimate
Produce
—
—
—
Procedures
Reproduce
Give an
example
—
—
—
—
Principles
State
Converts
—
—
—
—
Metacognitive
Proper use
Interpret
—
—
—
—
Preliminary conclusions
!  The GIS learning activities on hand in GEORED replicate the kind of tasks and
assignments which are also available in the textbooks that teachers use on a daily basis.
!  The contents’ analysis of the resources and materials offered in GEORED confirms the
prevalence of a “descriptive” approach to geography education, which emphasizes the sort
of enumerative and factual knowledge that guides geography teaching [in Portugal];
!  Results also reveal that the use of GIS is frequently the focus of the learning experience,
rather than being a tool to achieve different goals and to develop students’ higher order
thinking skills (i.e. the use of GIS seems not to free students from low-level learning
activities with little cognitive gain);
!  The use of GIS seems to be simply ruled by a sort of technological determinism, which
takes for granted that teachers would change their practices simply because a new
pedagogical tool or innovative resource — however appealing it may seem — becomes
available to them.
Final remarks
!  Can we take for granted that the availability and/or the promotion of GIS
resources and materials is enough per se to induce change vis-à-vis the
epistemological and pedagogical nature of the geographical knowledge that is
delivered through teaching?
!  To what extent did all the previous technological and pedagogical changes
(e.g. ICT) contribute to improve the sense and the value of the geographical
knowledge that emerged from existing teaching practices?
!  Is it possible to change the epistemological foundations of teachers’ practices
without reconstructing the ontological beliefs that frame teachers’ knowledge?
References (as regards the taxonomic contents’ analysis) !  Anderson, L. W. et al. (2013). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision
of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Pearson, Allyn & Bacon.
!  Arends, R. (2011). Learning to teach (9th Edition). New York: McGraw-Hill.
!  Biggs, J. B. and Collis, K. (1982). Evaluating the quality of learning: the SOLO taxonomy.
New York: Academic Press.
!  Clark, R. and Chopeta, L. (2010). Graphics for learning: proven guidelines for planning,
designing, and evaluating visuals in training materials. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
!  Clark, R. C. and Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-Learning and the science of instruction: proven
guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco: John Wiley
& Sons.
!  Hook, P. and Mills, J. (2011). SOLO Taxonomy: a guide for schools (BK 1). Laughton:
Essential Resources Educational Publishers Ltd.
Contacts
Fernando ALEXANDRE — [email protected]
Branca MIRANDA — [email protected]