Chapter 11: Geography

Building Assessments (Part 2)

By Rebecca Pellam, EdD

​Great Progress!

You’ve been doing excellent work refining your Year at a Glance (YAG) and assessment plans. This week, we’ll deepen your understanding of geography education by exploring Chapter 11 and continue building assessments for Unit 2 to assess your students’ geography skills. Your efforts are laying a strong foundation for effective teaching!

This Week's Focus:

This week, you’ll explore Chapter 11 to understand children’s geographic learning and apply this knowledge, alongside Chapter 3’s assessment framework, to design a summative assessment for Unit 2: Geography. A Quizizz lesson will walk you through key chapter aspects, emphasizing diverse assessment methods to tailor an assessment that captures mastery of geography skills.

Reading Assignment

Read Chapter 11: "Geography in the Elementary School: Overview and Research of Children’s Understanding of Geography" from "Teaching Elementary Social Studies: Principles and Applications" by James Zarrillo. Focus on:

• The struggle of geography in school curricula and its broad definition as a “way of knowing.”

• Research on children’s cognitive development in map reading (e.g., Piaget’s stages, symbol/scale understanding).

• The six geographic elements (e.g., world in spatial terms, environment and society) and five geographic skills (e.g., asking geographic questions, analyzing data).

• Challenges and strategies for teaching map reading and making (e.g., symbols, scale, grid, directions, and GIS use).

Assignment: Quizizz Lesson and Summative Assessment Development

After you have completed the reading, participate in the following Quizizz lesson to review the key concepts of geography instruction in the elementary classroom. Then, utilize the insights from Chapter 3 and 11 to build your own 10 question summative assessment.

Summative Assessment Development:

Objective: Develop a 10-question summative assessment for Unit 2: Geography to evaluate student mastery of geography skills and content, aligned with your grade’s Oklahoma standards and your Week Eight assessment plan.

Instructions for Creating Your Summative Assessment:

• Review Your Assessment Plan

  • Revisit your Week Eight assessment plan for Unit 2: Geography to identify the key geography skills and content you planned to assess (e.g., map reading, spatial analysis, human-environment interactions).

• Align with Standards and Skills

  • Use your grade’s Oklahoma geography standards and Chapter 11’s five geographic skills to guide question creation.

  • Ensure questions cover all standards and assess both content (e.g., “Do they know landforms?”) and processes (e.g., “Can they use maps?”).

Instructions for Creating Your Summative Assessment (continued):

• Design 10 Questions

  • Create a mix of question types:

    • multiple-choice (e.g., map elements, physical processes).

    • short-answer (e.g., explaining concepts, analyzing impacts).

    • map-based (e.g., labeling, calculating distances).

  • For each question, specify the standard and skill/content assessed (e.g., “4.2.1: Using map elements”).

• Incorporate Chapter 11 Insights

  • Use Chapter 11’s research (e.g., Piaget’s stages, symbol/scale challenges) to ensure questions are developmentally appropriate (e.g., use simplified maps for younger grades).

  • Reflect the six geographic elements (e.g., environment and society) in questions (e.g., “How does climate impact living?”).

Additional Notes:

• Use Chapter 11’s strategies (e.g., simplified maps, GIS-inspired tasks) to make questions engaging and appropriate.

• If you need help with question design or map creation, contact me—I can provide examples or resources.

• This summative assessment completes your Unit 2 evaluation, ensuring you can confirm student mastery of geography skills.

Looking Ahead: Next week, we’ll review your summative assessments in a group discussion, offering feedback to finalize your Unit 2 plans.

I’m excited to see your creative and rigorous summative assessments! Let’s make this week impactful.

Chapter 11 Review: Key Points

Overview: Geography’s Role in the Curriculum

• Struggle for Inclusion: Geography is widely recognized as essential but struggles to secure a significant place in school curricula. By 2004, most states (except Rhode Island and Iowa) had geography standards, but only half included geography in mandated state exams, reflecting limited emphasis even among social studies professionals (Segal & Helfenbein, 2008).

• Beyond Memorization: Geography should not be reduced to memorizing names and locations (e.g., capitals, rivers). Instead, it’s a “way of knowing” that involves spatial thinking and understanding interactions between people, places, and environments (Douglass, 1998).

• National Assessments: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1994 and 2001 showed modest improvement in geographic understanding (e.g., 48% at basic level in 1994 to 53% in 2001), but advanced proficiency remains low (2-3%).

Word Cloud

Why does the author say it is best to take the follow broad working definition for geography?

"Geography is the study of place just as history is the study of the past."

Multiple Select

Zarrillo states: "Geography uses the language of maps to communicate ideas about the context and distribution of phenomena and processes important for human decision making, issues of scale, the dynamic nature of phenomena, and cultural perspective." What are skills he says our students will need to master?

• know how to read and make several types of maps.

• Understand how people, resources, and products are distributed over the earth.

• provide a context for understanding events (be able to see how the decisions people make are influenced by their physical surroundings.

• preceive how people interact with the environment and how both people and places change.

• memorize and recite places on a map

Research on Geographic Learning and Teaching

• Piaget’s Stages: Jean Piaget identified three stages in children’s map-reading development:

  1. Topographical Stage: Young children can’t use directional labels (e.g., north/south).

  2. Projective Stage: Children determine location relative to themselves (e.g., left/right).

  3. Euclidean Stage (Ages 10-12): Children understand spatial relationships accurately.

  • However, later research using familiar contexts (e.g., cartoon characters) suggests children can handle maps earlier than Piaget proposed.

• Symbol Understanding: Children often interpret map symbols literally (e.g., yellow areas as eggs), but they can understand symbols as representations. The challenge lies in grasping relationships between symbols, influenced by symbol abstractness and map detail (Gregg & Leinhardt, 1994).

Zarrillo

" It is essential that our teaching be developmentally approapriate and not ask children to perform tasks beyond their abilities." 

Research on Geographic Learning and Teaching (continued):

• Scale Comprehension: Understanding scale requires:

  1. Proportional reasoning (relationships remain constant despite size changes).

  2. Ability to measure in map units (e.g., inches to miles).

  3. Understanding the map’s frame of reference (level of detail).

  • Scale is difficult for young children, who often draw maps with inconsistent proportions.

• Cognitive Processes in Map Reading: Map reading is complex, involving recognition, memory storage, and recall of spatial data. It requires a “bird’s-eye” perspective, which some children struggle to adopt (Muir & Frazee, 1986).

• Classroom Practices: Research shows children can learn geography earlier than previously thought (Trifonoff, 1997). Simplified maps (e.g., limited typefaces, clear symbols) and structured instruction help young learners (Miller, 1974; Atkins, 1981).

Multiple Select

Which of the following concepts should we teach explicitly?

• Physical characteristics such as elevation of land and types of vegetation

• Geopolitical information such as boundaries and capital cities

• Demographics: size, density, and identity of populations

• Economic Information: type and volumn of agricultural and manufactured products produced in places

Geography Content in the Elementary School:

• Key Content Areas: Geography should include:

  1. Physical characteristics (e.g., elevation, vegetation).

  2. Geopolitical information (e.g., boundaries, capitals).

  3. Demographics (e.g., population size, density).

  4. Economic information (e.g., agricultural/manufactured products).

• Six Geographic Elements (National Standards):

  1. World in Spatial Terms: Map-reading and map-making skills to understand spatial relationships.

  2. Places and Regions: Understanding unique characteristics of places and how regions are defined.

  3. Physical Systems: Processes shaping the Earth (e.g., floods, ecosystems).

  4. Human Systems: How humans shape, build on, and compete for Earth’s surface.

  5. Environment and Society: Interactions between people and the environment (e.g., dams creating lakes, hurricanes destroying buildings).

  6. Uses of Geography: Applying geographic knowledge to interpret the past, present, and future.

• State Standards: Most state standards include these elements but vary in emphasis, often focusing on physical geography (e.g., local region in 3rd grade, state in 4th grade).

Geography Processes:

• Five Geographic Skills (Guidelines for Geographic Education, 1984):

  1. Asking Geographic Questions: E.g., “Where is it located?” “Why is it there?”

  2. Acquiring Geographic Information: Using primary (e.g., field trips) and secondary (e.g., maps) sources.

  3. Organizing Information: Creating maps, charts, graphs, and summaries.

  4. Analyzing Geographic Information: Interpreting data to find trends and patterns.

  5. Answering Geographic Questions: Presenting findings with maps and reports, applying knowledge to interpret and predict.

Teaching Geography: Challenges and Principles:

• Challenges: Maps present information in an unfamiliar format, requiring a different literacy (map reading vs. text reading). Conformal (e.g., Mercator) and equal-area maps introduce distortions, complicating understanding.

• Principles of Instruction: Teaching should move from concrete to abstract, simple to complex:

  1. Start with body-based activities (e.g., directions in the classroom).

  2. Use 3D maps (e.g., relief maps).

  3. Introduce simplified maps for classroom use.

  4. Progress to real-world maps.

• Map Reading Skills: Focus on four aspects:

  1. Symbols: Teach using 3D, pictorial, and semi-pictorial symbols, progressing to abstract ones (e.g., stars for capitals).

  2. Scale: Start with life-size maps, then teach proportional reasoning and distance calculation.

  3. Grids and Direction: Use latitude/longitude for absolute location and compass rose for relative location (e.g., north of Missouri).

  4. Student-Made Maps: Include mental maps (diagnostic), relief maps (3D topography), and thematic maps (data trends).

Computer-Based Resources: GIS

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Tools like Google Earth and MyWorld GIS allow data retrieval, manipulation, and interactive mapping. They’re increasingly used in K-12 education.

• Benefits: GIS projects enhance spatial understanding, critical thinking, and engagement, moving beyond memorization to data analysis (Keiper, 1999; Segal & Helfenbein, 2008).

• Guidelines for GIS Use:

  1. Pre-Implementation: Select an appropriate GIS (e.g., Google Earth for younger students), define tasks, and plan scaffolds (e.g., step-by-step guides).

  2. Data Gathering: Guide students to access and interpret GIS data (e.g., maps, images).

  3. Data Analysis: Help students synthesize data to solve problems (e.g., why a school expanded).

  4. Data Sharing: Use digital (e.g., PowerPoint) or traditional (e.g., Play-Doh models) methods to present findings.

Application to Summative Assessment

• Developmental Appropriateness: Use Chapter 11’s research (e.g., Piaget’s stages, symbol/scale challenges) to ensure questions match students’ cognitive abilities (e.g., simplified maps for younger grades).

• Geographic Skills: Assess the five skills (e.g., analyzing data with map-based questions, answering questions with short-answer responses).

• Content Coverage: Include the six elements (e.g., physical systems via landform questions, environment and society via climate impact questions).

• Assessment Variety: Apply Chapter 3’s diverse data sources (e.g., map tasks, written responses) to create a balanced 10-question test.

Chapter 11 Quiz

​(feel free to use these questions as examples for your assessment due this week)

Multiple Choice

Multiple-Choice: Understanding Map Elements (4.2.1)

• Question: According to Chapter 11, what map feature helps us understand the meaning of symbols?

• Scale

• Compass Rose

• Legend

• Grid

Open Ended

Short-Answer: Spatial Thinking (4.2.1)

• Question: Chapter 11 emphasizes geography as a “way of knowing” through spatial interactions. Explain how latitude and longitude help you locate a place on a map.

Draw

Draw triangles over two of the major mountain ranges, trace 5 key rivers, and fill in the 13 original colonies.

Multiple Choice

Multiple-Choice: Physical Processes (4.2.2)

Question: Chapter 11 discusses physical systems that shape the Earth. Which process is most likely to create a valley over time?

• Earthquake

• Erosion

• Volcanism

• Flood

Open Ended

Short-Answer: Defining Regions (4.2.3)

Question: Chapter 11 highlights places and regions as a geographic element. How do people use physical features to define a region? Give an example.

Open Ended

A map has a scale of 1 inch = 500 miles. The task is to calculate the distance between Chicago and Denver, which measure two inches from each other. How many miles are between the two cities?

Multiple Choice

Multiple-Choice: Human-Environment Interaction (4.2.4)

Question: Chapter 11 notes that people modify the environment. What is an example of this?

• A hurricane destroys a town

• Building a dam creates a lake

• A drought causes migration

• An earthquake shifts land

Open Ended

Short-Answer: Climate Impact (4.2.4)

Question: Chapter 11 discusses how physical processes impact humans. Describe one way climate affects how people live in the Southwest U.S.

Draw

On the provided map, identify and label the state capitol, a major river, and the 7 geographic regions of the state.

Open Ended

Short-Answer: Applying Geography (4.2.3, 4.2.4)

Question: Chapter 11 emphasizes using geography to understand the past and present. How have physical processes changed a U.S. region over time? Provide an example.