Keywords

1 Introduction

Geospatial technologies (GST) have long been used in education in many countries. Teachers and students from around the world are using desktop and web GIS, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Google Earth and many location based services available from the Internet in the teaching and learning of school subjects such as geography, environmental sciences, social sciences, history, biology and mathematics. The potential of GST for teaching and learning have been identified in many studies. Although a great majority of the literature expresses many different benefits of GST for education, some studies raise concerns about its effectiveness by addressing the need to find the proper methods for its implementation.

2 Potentials of GST for Teaching and Learning

The benefits of GST for teaching and learning have been identified in many studies since the beginning of the 1990s. Many studies addressed the supporting role of GST as a versatile tool for teaching and learning geography (Bednarz and Van der Schee 2006; Demirci 2011; Kim et al. 2011; Patterson et al. 2003; Wang and Chen 2013). Although it can even be used in traditional educational settings (Lidstone and Stoltman 2006), GST changed the landscape of teaching and learning (Alibrandi 2003), and transformed it into an environment in which constructivist educational strategies are applied (Bednarz and Ludwig 1997; Doering and Veletsianos 2008; Kerski et al. 2013). Instead of being passive receivers of information, constructivist approaches and methods with GST make students active explorers of their own understanding (Huang 2011) and allow them to learn through their own experiences (Bednarz 2004).

GST provides students with a large amount of information and many mapping tools (Huang 2011) for geographic data analysis, exploration and visualization with which students gather and analyze information (Liu and Zhu 2008) to ask and answer geographic questions (Shin 2006). Geospatial practices turn students into researchers (Baker and White 2003) by helping them to visualize and examine geographic patterns in their data (Breetzke et al. 2011), and relationships between and among spatial phenomena (Stoltman and De Chano 2003). Practices with GST increase student-map interactivity, which enables students to see the possibility of discovering unknowns (Wiegand 2003). A diverse set of activities such as gathering, storing, visualizing, querying, analyzing and managing data with various GST supports many constructivist educational strategies, approaches and methods. According to Liu and Zhu (2008, p. 14), “these tools [GIS technology] can support geographic inquiry by allowing learners to formulate geographic questions or hypotheses, access and obtain geographic data from multiple sources, present geographic data and information in forms of maps, images, tables, and charts, explore the data through carefully constructed queries, and analyze the data to answer the questions or draw conclusions.” As addressed in many other studies, GST supports issue-based, student-centered and standard-based education (Kerski 2003), encourages problem, inquiry and project based learning (Akerson and Dickinson 2003; Favier and Van der Schee 2012; Lidstone and Stoltman 2006; Meyer et al. 1999; Nielsen et al. 2011), facilitates collaborative work, individual learning (Baker and White 2003; Keiper 1999) and assists to create inductive learning environments (Milson and Earle 2008).

Practicing with GST to enhance teaching and learning in geography can have broad educational benefits for students, which can be classified in three different categories in this chapter. GST helps students to (1) develop skills, (2) provide knowledge and (3) gain motivation, attitude and understanding. One of the most important reasons for practicing with GST in education is that it provides students with many valuable skills. Apart from various personal, entrepreneurial and marketable skills that enhance students’ future careers (Goldstein and Alibrandi 2013) and contribute to improving youth employability (Shin 2006), teaching with GST encourages critical, effective and scientific thinking in education (Akerson and Dickinson 2003; Bevainis 2008; Goldstein and Alibrandi 2013; Roulston 2013). As addressed in a growing number of studies, GST also has great potential to develop high-order-thinking skills (Doering and Veletsianos 2008; Kerski 2003; Linn et al. 2005; West 2003; Wilder et al. 2003), enabling students to apply, analyze, evaluate and create information rather than merely memorizing it (Liu et al. 2010). Spatial thinking is also among the most cited skills that GST develops, especially for geography education (Audet and Abegg 1996; Bednarz 2004; Biilmann 2001; DeMers and Vincent 2008; Lee and Bednarz 2009; Kerski 2008; Wiegand 2001). Being an important skill for everyday life, spatial thinking is used to solve problems by analyzing the spatial relationships of objects and places with reference to locations, distances, directions, shapes and patterns (Kidman and Palmer 2006). Practices with GST allow students to perform functions such as spatial querying, statistical analysis and visualization, which facilitate students’ manipulating, querying, analyzing, summarizing and editing spatial data (Goldstein and Alibrandi 2013). All these functions of GST help students to think spatially (Lee and Bednarz 2009), to ask spatial questions (Nellis 1994), to gain spatial awareness (West 2008) and, finally, to solve spatial problems (Audet and Paris 1997; Demirci et al. 2013a). By considering all the skills, whether mentioned here or not, we can easily say that many different in and out-of-class practices involving GST helps students to think geographically (Baker et al. 2009; Shin 2006), and to ask and to answer geographic questions by acquiring, organizing and analyzing geographic information, which are the key issues in secondary school geography education (Keiper 1999; Schultz et al. 2008).

The practice of GST has a great potential to enhance geographic learning and to improve geographic literacy (Benimmas et al. 2011; Favier and Van der Schee 2012; Liu and Zhu 2008; Shin 2007; Wechsler and Pitts 2004). Students practicing GST can understand geography more efficiently (Demirci 2008) by exploring geographic issues and problems (Bednarz and van der Schee 2006; Lemberg and Stoltman 2001; Liu and Zhu 2008) with real-world relevance to the subject (Baker et al. 2009). Shin (2006) studied the use of GIS with primary school students and concluded that it improved geographic literacy better than other methods. In their quantitative study, Wechsler and Pitts (2004) practiced GST with high school students and asserted that the application significantly increased students’ geographic knowledge. In another study, Milson and Earle (2008) observed an enhancement in geographic learning when they used an Internet-based GIS with their students. GST can also improve students’ abilities to carry out location-based scientific research (Baker and White 2003) and provide them with important tools to explore and study local issues and environments (Bednarz 2004; Lemberg and Stoltman 2001). Geospatial practices also allow students to study and understand local, regional and global geographical issues and problems and thereby enhances students’ achievement in geography lessons (Demirci 2008; Goldstein and Alibrandi 2013; Wechsler and Pitts 2004).

Skills and knowledge are not the only attributes that can be developed and enhanced by the practice of GST. As stated in many studies, GST has an even greater potential to motivate students to learn and make them more interested in lessons. Goodchild and Kemp (1990) addressed this more than two decades ago by stating that GIS helps enhance students’ interest in geography and motivates them toward careers in science and engineering. Many other studies consolidated this and presented that learning with GST improves students’ attitudes, motivation, self-efficacy and enthusiasm in geography lessons (Baker and White 2003; Demirci 2008; Demirci et al. 2013b; Doering and Veletsianos 2008; Kerski 2003; Nielsen et al. 2011). If applied with proper methods, GST may also make students more responsible and sensitive toward local/global issues and problems (Demirci et al. 2013b; Keiper 1999). The author of this chapter worked together with 124 students from three public schools in Turkey for nearly a year in nine different GIS-based projects that were related to local communities, and found that the students’ sensitivity towards society and its problems increased (Fig. 12.1) (Demirci et al. 2013b). In a similar study, Milson and Earle (2008) stated that Internet-GIS projects can benefit students with cultural awareness and empathy for distant others.

Fig. 12.1
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High school students in Turkey are measuring noise pollution with GIS in their school district

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3 Are Geospatial Practices Actually Effective in Teaching and Learning?

Due to its versatile benefits for teaching and learning, the practice of GST in education has expanded from a few countries, such as the USA, the UK and Canada, to many other countries around the world, first with GIS started in the early 1990s, and then began to include other digital technologies such as GPS, web-based mapping/GIS systems and many other location based applications available from the Internet (Kerski et al. 2013). Teachers and students today are utilizing GST in and out of classroom settings, in many countries across the six continents, including Norway, Germany, Austria, Uganda, Rwanda, Colombia, Chile, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan (Bevainis 2008; Lay et al. 2013; Milson et al. 2012a). Although the practices of GST has been gradually spreading around the world, its use in the classrooms lags far behind what researchers had hoped for more than a decade ago (Doering and Veletsianos 2008; Kim et al. 2011; Roulston 2013). Kerski et al. (2013) confirmed this when they studied the use of GIS in 33 countries, in a recent study. They found that the current global landscape of GIS remains small for secondary education. GIS has still not become a widely used, effective teaching tool, even in countries such as the US and the UK, which pioneered the use of GIS in education more than two decades ago (Bednarz and van der Schee 2006; Henry and Semple 2012; Kerski 2003).

The slow rate of practicing GST at the secondary school level has been attributed to many different challenges and obstacles in different studies (Baker 2005; Baker et al. 2009; Bednarz and Audet 1999; Chun and Hong 2007; Kerski 2003; Lidstone and Stoltman 2006; Milson and Earle 2008). Milson and Kerski (2012) identified these challenges as technological, pedagogical, administrative and curricular hurdles (Fig. 12.2). Technological challenges are related to the availability of data, software, computer and Internet infrastructure. Teachers’ lack of skills, knowledge and experiences about GIS, and lack of motivation to use it in their lessons constituted pedagogical hurdles. Administrative obstacles were mainly related to whether or not the conditions in schools and in the education systems were favorable toward the use of GST in lessons (e.g., school managers’ attention towards using GIS). Curricular impediments were the lack of strong subjects or curriculums to host GIS in schools (Demirci et al. 2013b). Some studies attributed the slow take-up rate of GST to other reasons, such as lack of research showing the effectiveness of this technology in education. According to Kerski (2003), the effectiveness of GIS in teaching and learning is unclear: this is among the reasons behind the low interest in GIS. Baker and Bednarz (2003) have also identified a lack of sufficient research on the effectiveness of GIS as an important obstacle preventing the use of GIS in schools. After all, the studies have been carried out over, roughly, the last three decades; can we not say very strongly that GST is effective teaching and learning tool for secondary schools? We need to look at the literature in order to elaborate on the possible answers.

Fig. 12.2
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Conditions affecting the use of GST in education

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The educational benefits of practicing GST in secondary education began to be discussed in research papers at the beginning of the 1990s (Patterson et al. 2003); however, empirical data showing the effects of GIS on geographic learning, motivation, spatial ability and problem solving started to emerge by the late 1990s (Huynh 2009). There is not a study in the literature advocating that GST is useless for education. In general, there are two groups of studies concerning the effectiveness of GST for teaching and learning. The first group states that GST is effective in teaching and learning, despite reservations about a proper implementation method being raised. Although the majority of these studies are qualitative and based on theory, some important quantitative studies have been carried out, especially in recent years. The majority of these studies indicated that GST was effective, especially in making geography lessons more visual, student-centered and desirable by increasing students’ achievements (Demirci 2008, 2011; Goldstein and Alibrandi 2013; Keiper 1999; Kerski 2003; Meyer et al. 1999; Patterson et al. 2003; Shin 2007; West 2003).

Audet and Abegg (1996) conducted one of the early studies to understand the effects of teaching with GST. After using GIS in a pilot study with high school students, they found that GIS was helpful for students when developing problem-solving abilities. Keiper (1999) also conducted a study in the late 1990s to understand the cognitive implications of GIS use in education. After conducting a GIS learning project with his students, Keiper stated that the project dramatically shifted the study of geography from memorization of places to the practice of geography skills; therefore, it encouraged the use of geographic knowledge.

The studies aiming to measure the effectiveness of geospatial practices for teaching and learning increased in number in the early 2000s. Baker and White (2003) developed and implemented a project based learning unit with two groups of students: one with collaborative GIS, the other with paper maps from an eighth grade Earth science lesson. They found a significant improvement in attitudes toward technology and in geographic data analysis for students who used GIS. Kerski (2003) carried out another important quantitative study almost at the same time. Kerski developed 12 geography lessons and implemented them with two methods: one with GIS, the other with traditional print materials. He found that the practices with GIS had a significant effect on student performance, increased students’ test scores and improved students’ abilities to synthesize, identify and describe reasons for human and physical patterns. In the same study, Kerski also concluded that GIS practices fostered students’ higher-order analytical and synthetic thinking.

The effectiveness of practicing GST has been analyzed in more detail in many other recent studies. Liu et al. (2010) evaluated problem-based learning using GIS technology in a Singapore secondary school with students in experimental and control groups. They observed that students in the control group showed memorization skills, while students in the experimental group demonstrated higher-level cognitive learning skills, especially analytical and evaluation skills. In another recent study, Perkins et al. (2010) stated that a three-day GIS/GPS curriculum significantly increased students’ spatial awareness. Goldstein and Alibrandi (2013) carried out quantitative analyses on standardized test scores of two groups of middle school students, with and without GIS instructions, and found out that GIS instructions significantly affected students’ achievement on reading scores and on final course grades in science and social studies.

The second view in the literature concerning the effectiveness of GST usually raises concern that the studies and experiences of teaching with GST have not targeted higher order thinking skills especially in secondary education. Therefore, the effectiveness of GST has not yet been proven. There is a need to develop further research to determine whether GIS and other GSTs are actually effective for teaching and learning. We need to look at the literature from a historical perspective in order to understand the concerns raised in relation to their underlying reasons. Since there was not enough evidence, if any, showing that GIS was an efficient tool to enhance education, the studies published in the 1990s addressed the lack of empirical data to aid in understanding the real effect of GIS in education. Audet (1993) argued that GIS should be used in teaching and learning environments only if it could be proved that it enhanced the way students visualized and interpreted information. Bednarz and Ludwig (1997) raised the same issue by saying that clear evidence was needed to understand if GIS was an effective teaching and learning tool in order to persuade teachers of its value. The studies carried out until the early 2000s were mainly based on intuition or assumptions that the use of GST supported constructivist learning environments; however, they did not provide enough pedagogical evidence concerning the effectiveness of GST as an educational tool (Biilmann 2001; Keiper 1999; Lemberg and Stoltman 2001).

One of the most critical studies came from Bednarz (2004), where it was questioned whether GIS was a tool that would support geography and environmental education. This study was published at nearly the same time as other empirical studies that evaluated the effectiveness of GIS for teaching and learning, such as the ones conducted by Kerski (2003) and Baker and White (2003). Bednarz, in the study, addressed questions regarding the benefits, rationales and necessities of teaching with GIS in education. For example, what insights does GIS allow that the other ways of learning do not? This was asked at the first conference on the educational application of GIS, organized in the US in 1994, yet, the same questions remained unanswered a decade later in 2003. By drawing attention to pedagogical issues, Bednarz (2004, p. 198), in the same study, said “we cannot afford to continue to assume that, simply by doing GIS, students will recognize or learn cognitive mapping processes, spatial analysis or spatial thinking”.

Different questions and concerns were raised in the following years regarding the effectiveness of GST for education. In their editorial note in the Journal of Geographical Education, International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, Lidstone and Stoltman (2006, p. 206) asked, “how much GIS should students know, how should they use it, and how long will the operational skills persist in the minds of the learners?” In his Ph.D. dissertation, West (2008, p. 96) repeated almost the same concerns raised in the previous studies by saying, “whether or how using GIS enables students to attain the goals of geography remains largely unknown”. In another doctoral study completed in 2009, Huynh (2009) addressed the fact that the research carried out up to that point had usually focused on geographic knowledge, skills, problem solving and attitudes; however, they missed some important areas such as the fundamental knowledge and skills needed for effective GIS use, which is a point still needs further study today to clarify.

Nearly all the studies that raised concerns and questions about the effectiveness of geospatial practices in education actually supported the general view that GIS and other geospatial technologies have great potential and many possible benefits for teaching and learning if they are used with proper methods. Bednarz and van der Schee (2006, p. 203) expressed this as “skeptical enthusiasm”, by saying that they had been enthusiastic about the potential of GIS, but unsure about its fit with the traditional geography curriculum. The concerns and questions raised in these studies generally stem from a search to understand the true and specific values and benefits of GST compared to other technologies and methodologies for teaching and learning. As Doering and Veletsianos (2008) addressed, if the practices of GST enable learners only to employ and present data passively, there will not be much difference in the learning process when similar actions were applied with a different method or technology. A paper-based GIS exercise conducted in South Africa was found to be an adequate alternative to contemporary computerized GIS teaching methods (Breetzke et al. 2011). However, as emphasized by Shin (2006), GST provides students a platform upon which they can interact with data in a dynamic environment where they can manipulate and experiment in a way that would be difficult to do with other types of materials.

4 Conclusion

Another decade has passed since Bednarz (2004) raised questions about the effectiveness of teaching with GIS, and we still cannot say that we have answered all of those questions. New questions and concerns appear while GST and our needs in education to use it change and diversify. However, what we can say today is that many more researchers from around the world have been studying the use of GST in the teaching and learning of different subjects at schools. An important difference is that recent and new studies are mainly focusing on how we can benefit more efficiently from continuously evolving and changing GST, rather than discussing the effectiveness of these educational tools.

The answer of the question asked in the title of the previous section as “Are geospatial practices actually effective in teaching and learning?” is simply “yes”. However, we need to define what we mean by effectiveness in order to have more detailed and satisfactory answers. Many versatile benefits of GST for teaching and learning described throughout this paper indicate that GST has an effective tool in many different ways; therefore, many different measurements should be taken into consideration to determine its true and detailed effectiveness. A study may not confirm a meaningful contribution of GIS to students’ test scores, because using any inquiry based method like GIS does not fit very well with standardized tests. Even in this case, we cannot easily say that GIS was not effective, because it might have been effective in many other ways, such as in enhancing students’ spatial thinking and critical thinking skills, motivating them to raise questions and search for answers by working with data, connecting them with community and global issues, helping them to choose a career, and even helping them to stay in school and graduate. Therefore, before studying the effectiveness of GST, we first need to determine the specific area in which we are seeking its contribution, and then we need to have an appropriate assessment methodology to measure its effectiveness. Some of the recent studies developed and tested different assessment methodologies to measure the effectiveness of GIS in specific areas such as in enhancing spatial thinking skills (Lee and Bednarz 2012).

The slow adoption of utilizing GST in classrooms such as GIS, GPS, Google Earth, and other location based services provided from the Internet does not mean that these technologies are not effective for teaching and learning, as countless examples from around the world, some of which have been outlined in this chapter, demonstrate successful stories. However, among many different challenges, the most important problem seems to stem from the traditional teaching strategies that we are accustomed to using in our classrooms and never want to abandon. We would like to use GST effectively for analysis, synthesis and evaluations that constitute higher order thinking skills; however, we do not question enough how much our current geography, or other lessons, support these important thinking skills with their content, curriculum, teaching methods and resources without the involvement of GST. As Bednarz and van der Schee (2006) said, we have to work together with teachers and students to conduct our lessons in different ways through inquiry and problem based learning in order to foster such skills. However, the majority of our teachers with poor preparation in geography lack the fundamental concepts related to asking and answering important spatialized questions (Bednarz and van der Schee 2006). For this important reason, many studies emphasize teacher-centered problems as the most important obstacles when using GST in classrooms effectively (Bednarz 2004; Bednarz and van der Schee 2006; Bevainis 2008; Kim et al. 2011). The author of the chapter experienced and observed this problem personally in one of his studies: the teachers who remained only observers and did not want to participate in a GIS based project conducted in their schools were the ones who mainly conducted their lessons via traditional methods, including the use of textbooks and descriptions (Demirci et al. 2013b).

Rapid developments in science and technology have been transforming geospatial technologies quickly. Every passing day, more and more people are becoming involved in many different forms of these technologies in their routine lives: commonly through their tablets, computers and smart-phones with an Internet connection. This development has already created a contrast between teachers and students in the classrooms in terms of their understanding and use of new technologies, which is described as the “digital divide” (Milson et al. 2012a, b) or a clash between the “digital” students and the “analogue” teachers (Svatonova and Mrazkova 2010). Geospatial technologies are most likely to become one of the most widely used educational tools in secondary education when the digital students begin to dominate our classrooms, schools, and state departments of education as teachers, managers, and policy makers, which is what we have started experiencing today. As indicated in many other studies (Baker 2005; Johnson et al. 2011; Schultz et al. 2008), the use of web based resources such as Web GIS, mapping systems and Google Earth have great potential to facilitate and catalyze the adoption process of GST in secondary schools. However, effective practice of these technologies will always depend upon how informed we are about their roles in our teaching activities and proper methodologies, through which their versatile benefits will be realized in our classrooms as teachers, educators, decision makers and school managers. After removing all the pedagogical and mainly teacher-centered obstacles, only then we can make sure that our efforts to avoid technological, administrative and curricular hurdles will not be in vain and will bring benefits in order to allow the use of GST in our classrooms more effectively and commonly.