Browsing by Author "Virtanen, Pentti"

Objectives. As the national curriculum states one objective in elementary school geography and biology is to understand the map of the world and learn its essential nomenclature. Previous studies have mainly focused on children's mental maps of the world drawn on paper so it's interesting to examine whether there are differences on how children perceive map of the world in two-dimensional and three-dimensional format. The objective of this study was to examine sixth graders' mental maps of the world first drawn on paper and then on spherical surface. Differences between those two drawn maps were also examined. Methods. 19 sixth graders from two different classes in one school were part of this study. They draw mental map of the world on paper from memory. Later they did the same but this time drawing was made on spherical surface. Mental maps were given points in five different categories. General quality of the maps was also given a grade. Differences between maps drawn on paper and spherical surface were examined by statistical methods. Results and conclusions. Results of this study revealed that as previous studies have stated, most common flaws were related to the size and shape of the continents. There was no statistical significance between the general quality of the maps drawn on paper and on spherical surface. There was statistical significance between maps drawn on paper and on spherical surface in a category that measured how well continents were drawn on correct hemisphere as maps drawn on spherical surface got lower scores. Results of this study point out that there seems to be very little difference on quality of children's mental maps whether those are drawn on paper or on spherical surface.