Learning and remembering from thematic maps of familiar regions

The State of the Art in Cartograms

“…She chose three distinct evaluation tasks from the range of very general to specific in order to find out how well the geographical information is communicated by cartograms, and found out that non‐contiguous cartograms Worked well for showing general distribution of information, but did not Work well for showing specific information (ratios between two states). Experiments involving cartograms and choropleth maps have been conducted to test if “map labeling served as a cued recall task to determine whether theme data could be associated with administrative regions.” [Rit94, RK98]. The results showed that the use of feature information (value shading) in choropleth maps was more advantageous than the use of structural information (area distortion) in cartograms for depicting data to be remembered.…”

“…Further evaluations on the memorability cartograms are needed. For example, the earlier studies [RK98, Rit94] used only one type of non‐contiguous cartogram. There are no studies comparing the memorability of different types of cartograms.…”

Mental map as a tool and an object of research in geographical education

“…Sahara, Jihoafrická republika, Demokratická republika Kongo. Tyto výsledky jsou z části potvrzeny i výsledky výzkumů Rittschof, Griffin, Custer (1998), Rittschof, Kulhavy (1998). Plošné geografické objekty jsou v mapě nejvýraznějšı́m kartografickým vyjadřovacı́m prostředkem (Č apek, Mikšovský, Mucha 1992).…”

“…Na základě výsledků přı́padové studie lze s omezenou platnostı́ na zkoumanou třı́du vliv kartografických produktů potvrdit, a to zejména ve smyslu vlivu použitých kartografických vyjadřovacı́ch prostředků a velikosti použitého popisu v mapě. Z hlediska použitých kartografických vyjadřovacı́ch prostředků žáci zkoumané třı́dy zakreslovali zejména geografické objekty, které jsou ve školnı́ch atlasech znázorněné plochou (areálovou metodou), s čı́mž je možné se setkat i v dalšı́ch studiı́ch (vı́ce v Rittschof, Kulhavy 1998). Největšı́ potı́že (a byly tedy zakresleny s nižšı́ četnostı́) žákům dělala liniová reprezentace objektu (vodnı́ toky).…”

Social Media Tools and Platforms in Learning Environments

“…The educational opportunities of geovisualisation are also enormous, as there is a contentious premise that humans learn more effectively and efficiently within a visual as opposed to a textual or numerical setting (Lloyd 1997); for example, Rittschof and Kulhavy (1998) found that regions and information about them were remembered better when learnt from a map rather than from a table. The enhanced educational benefits of digital maps are based on their two major features: (a) digital maps can contain much more (multimedia) information than paper maps; and (b) students have more control over the geo-information displayed on digital maps by choosing what and how is displayed.…”