Where are they looking at? Students' strategies of familiarization with a general-reference map of an unknown area
Abstrakt
General-reference maps are widely used in education as a part of school atlases and geography textbooks. Students usually face a new map connected to a new topic or problem during their geography classes.
However, how students process the map of an unknown area and with possibly distinct symbology or layout is not yet understood. This study focuses on what strategies students use to get familiar with the yet unknown general-reference map before they face map tasks with the given map.
One-minute-long familiarization of 20 upper-secondary students was part of an eye-tracking experiment accompanied by a follow-up questionnaire. The results showed that most participants paid the majority of their attention during the time to the map face, specifically, they were reading and trying to memorize locations and labels of certain objects.
Although most participants paid some attention to the coordinate grid and the graphic scale, the time they allocated to these map elements was distinctly lower than the time they used the map face and the legend. Additionally, participants mostly paid attention to the coordinate grid and the graphic scale later during the familiarization process.
According to the follow-up questionnaire, the students were aware of the limited work with the aforementioned map elements during their process of familiarization. When it comes to the order of using the map face and the legend, the participants chose different approaches.
The results showed how students process unfamiliar maps and on which parts of the map they paid attention to. The study should be of interest to both educators and cartographers, as teachers can then better support students in effective familiarization with the new map in lessons, and cartographers can make (educational) maps more intuitive for novice learners.