Teaching methods very widely and there are numerous studies in the literature dealing with the classification of teaching methods. Most of the taxonomies tend to classify the methods into several categories. For example, Clark (2008) suggests that teaching methods could be classified into four categories, including receptive instruction, directive instruction, guided discovery and exploratory instruction.
Fenstermacher and Soltis (2004) classify different methods into three categories by teaching style, consisting of teacher as executive, facilitator or liberationist.
However, Joyce et al. (2009) are among the leaders in the classification of teaching methods. They define four major families of teaching methods, comprising behav- ioral systems family, information-processing family, personal family and social family. Their model has been well-accepted by educational researchers.
In order to describe the practices of geospatial education in high schools comprehensively, the model contributed by Joyce, Weil, and Calhoun is used to provide the framework for the following discussion. Most of the practices fall on behavioral system family, information-processing family, and social family. It doesn’t mean one family is superior to others, because a teacher may adopt more than one family to meet different learning goals. Besides, the effectiveness of a family to some extent is dependent on cultural contexts. The examples of practices will be introduced following each family.
6.4.1 Behavioral System Family
The behavioral system family attempts to build efficient environments for shaping learner’s behaviors by manipulating reinforcement. The examples of the methods in the family are direct instruction and mastery learning. These methods tend to be teacher-centered. They focus on observable skills and behaviors. It has been proven that these methods could be more effective than models in other families for increasing the scores on standardized tests of basic skills (Huitt2003). They are especially effective when there are a great number of students in the classroom or the syllabus hour is very limited. Many researchers also found that teacher-centered instructions seemed favorable for teachers in many Asian countries, because student-centered instructions, such as problem-based learning and cooperative learning are more difficult to be implemented (Yap et al.2008; Lam et al.2009;
Yuda2009).
Teacher-centered instruction is frequently applied to introduce the concepts of GIS and to learn how to operate GIS software. For example, from a national-wide survey of high school geography teachers in Taiwan, Wang and Chen (2013) found that 93 % of the teachers choose didactic and catechetical instruction as their primary teaching methods when they “teach about” GIS. In the introductory GIS lessons, the textbook publisher’s CDs are the major supplementary resource. The 6 Geospatial Education in High Schools: Curriculums, Methodologies, and Practices 71
CDs contains animations and slides which are efficient for demonstrating the concepts and basic functions of GIS and make them popular for teachers. The behavioral system family seems a logical choice for the geospatial education in the entry level especially when resources are short and class size is big. However, students will need more hands-on exercises and inquiry-based learning when higher-order thinking skills are expected (Dong and Lin2012).
6.4.2 Information-Processing Family
The models of the information-processing family aim to help learners to acquire data, sense problems, generate solutions, develop concepts, and employ verbal or non-verbal symbols for communication. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) and problem- based learning (PBL) are two strategies frequently cited in research. Both in IBL and PBL, group work is a common feature. Students gather together to reflect critically, and they collaborate to develop questions, investigate information, con- struct knowledge, and share understandings of information. Although the two methods are very similar, there are some slight differences. For example, the knowledge to be developed is often acquired before the investigation takes place in IBL. Therefore, in-class learning is prior to undertaking fieldwork. In contrast, learning activities in PBL are “problem first”. The problem is usually set by the teacher in the first place for stimulating learner’s motivation (Spencer and Jordan 1999).
Favier and van der Schee (2012) provide a success story for applying IBL with GST to a student research project. After the introduction of economic-geographic concepts like “range” and “market area”, students were required to choose a particular service in town for case study. They had a short GIS training session and learned how to draw a map representing the market area of a service. Students chose four local gyms as the targets for investigation. They were asked to formulate hypotheses about the order of their market area size. Then they went to the gyms and interviewed 20 customers at each location. Students later marked the cus- tomers’home location in the map and evaluated the agreement between the reality and their assumption. They presented their research results with maps to their teacher and classmates. The teacher followed up their presentation with discussion and summarized what they learned.
Hsu and Chen (2010) provided another example of IBL practice by integrating virtual reality and mobile learning for implementation. Fourteen students as five teams were asked to evaluate three proposals for improving a polluted irrigation ditch in the local area. A virtual field trip (VFT) website was established allowing students to learn the background information of this irrigation ditch, to understand the basic concepts of sustainable development, and to virtually explore the sur- roundings of each fieldwork site. Then the students conducted a self-guided fieldtrip with a PDA which provided the functions of field navigation and learning support.
Students were navigated by the GPS in the PDA to investigate 5 fieldwork sites. The
72 C.-M. Chen and Y.-H. Wang
PDA would automatically prompt students to proceed to fieldwork assignments when they are within 15 m of the 5 fieldwork sites. For example, the PDA asked students to interview two local residents for sharing their visions about the irriga- tion ditch, and to save the results as text message in the system. After the comple- tion of fieldworks, students downloaded the field data from PDA, evaluated the proposals based on their field investigation, picked one out of three proposals, and validated their decision. The feedback from teachers and students shown that teachers highly regarded the VFT and PDA as useful tools for facilitating fieldwork and students felt they are true “scientists” because they could complete the research with only little help from teachers.
Liu et al. (2010) developed PBL learning activities with and without GIS support to validate the assumption that learning with GIS can result in higher-order learning outcomes. In the first place, an ill-structured problem was provided to students regarding to the significant growth of migrants and its implications with the aging society in Singapore’s population. Students had to play as the Head of the Research Team in the Aging Population Committee and answer the questions such as “Any specific town, constituency, or zone that has a high number of elderly?”, “Where would you think the Government might need to provide more aged care facilities and services?”, “At which Mass Rapid Transit stations would you expect the greatest numbers of escalator accidents involving the elderly?”, and “What facili- ties need to be provided to avert this problem?”. The students in the experimental group used ArcGIS and geographic data including provincial boundaries, census data, socioeconomic data, and satellite imagery to find the answers of the above questions. The results of this quasi-experimental research proved the experimental group using GIS outperformed the control group without using GIS in the tests of higher-order thinking skills.
6.4.3 Social Family
The teaching models of the social family encourage students to build learning community so that they can work together and learn from each other. Therefore, one general educational outcome here is the development of solid citizenship (Joyce et al. 2009). Geographic problems in the real world are often complex, and solving the problems usually require Interdisciplinary team work. The social family could improve student’s learning motivation and interpersonal skills which are important in the workplace. Role playing and collaborative learning are two common pedagogical models in this family.
Sanchez et al. (2010) designed a role-playing game about sustainable develop- ment and used GST to engage students in complex situations in the real world. The game starts from the project call by the city mayor (teacher). Six companies (6 pairs of students) have to design a project for implementing new energies in the city of Se`te, south of France. Each company specialized in different sorts of green energies including heat pumps, windmills, ocean wave energy, photovoltaics and 6 Geospatial Education in High Schools: Curriculums, Methodologies, and Practices 73
methanization. The committee tender (pair of students) is responsible for the process rules and to consult a local association of citizens (another pair of students) for the best choice among six projects. Students playing the six companies use Google Earth to provide 3D model with a site view for their project and to assess the impact on the local environment. The committee tender and the association of citizens have to go to the field with a GPS embedded Pocket PC to collect data for validating the projects. The interview videos of local residents are provided to them in different places in the city via MITAR, augmented reality software. The students use posters to present their final project in the school library. Finally all students play as local residents and vote for the best project via a website. In such a game- based learning design, GSTs permit teachers to design complex situations in real world and engage students to a problem requiring multidisciplinary knowledge and communication skill to solve.
The Scientific Research Class of Red Bank High School in Chattanooga Ten- nessee, USA presents a success story about the collaborative project among high school students, OpenStreetMap volunteers, and GIS Corps. Padang is one of Indonesia’s most vulnerable cities. An earthquake in 2009 claimed over 1,100 lives in that area and over 800,000 people are at risk from earthquake and tsunami activities in the future. The students in the high school worked as a team to digitize all of the visible buildings and roads in the satellite imagery. The online map in great detail allows the local government and others to estimate the number of people and buildings that will be impacted by natural disasters. The interactive web-mapping platforms like OpenStreetMap could connect students to the rest of world and expand their learning beyond school (Hale2012).