Social Studies in Improving Students’ Map Skills: Teachers’ Opinions

Abstract

Teaching skills is one of the building blocks of Turkey's Social Studies Instructional Program. Via skills, information can be effectively transformed into high-level behaviors, that information may become a part of one's daily life, and that one may make right decisions concerning major issues in his/her life. Map skills are called "spatial perception skills" within Turkey's Social Studies Instructional Program. Map skills-one of the basic geographical skills-can easily be employed by students to solve a wide variety of problems in their daily lives. The opinions and experience of teachers who have been instructing this course should be taken into consideration in order to decide whether students are successful or not at gaining these skills during their social studies course. As such, this study was conducted using a survey model in accordance with the qualitative research method. Research data were collected via semi-structured interviews held with Social Studies teachers living in Eskisehir, Turkey during April, May, and June of 2011. All data were analyzed via content analysis. The research findings have revealed that students' map skills are perceived to be weak based by social studies teachers and that there is a disagreement as to the effectiveness of Turkey's Social Studies Course Instructional Program in equipping students with these skills. Moreover, teachers were found to be of the opinion that not only are students' opportunities to practice and improve their map skills limited, but that there are a number of problems stemming from students, the Social Studies Course Instructional Program, and the physical infrastructure of schools. For this reason, relevant suggestions have also been included in this study.

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“…This result is also in line with the literature which shows a relationship between map use and map literacy (Aksoy & Ablak, 2019). In contrast, it is known that material infrastructure, such as maps, is insufficient for learning due to students' weak mapping skills (Gökçe, 2015).…”

Role of geography teacher in forming the pupils’ cartographic competence

“…Theoretical analysis of teaching practices has shown that only when the teacher constantly use maps during the geography lessons, pupils are more successful in understanding cartographic concepts, however, the influence of different methods and techniques on students' cartographic skills should be further determined (Gökçe 2015). Only deliberate and systematic work on the formation of methods of map reading the map leads to the acquisition of cartographic competence and develops pupils cognitive activity.…”

“…For example, a teacher can use interactive crossword puzzles or interactive maps where pupils move one finger in continental space and use it during testing, such as in a test mode. In-service training programs should be conducted in order to help teachers catch up on skills in preparing and using maps and in technologies, such as GIS, Google Earth, and Google Map (Gökçe 2015). These technologies are powerful tools in this work as they provide high visibility of displaying diverse information in the form of interactive electronic maps.…”

Evaluación de recursos audiovisuales para la enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales en Educación Secundaria.

“…En la enseñanza de la Historia, y especialmente de la Geografía, los mapas son fundamentales, y así se consideran desde hace décadas (Fairgrieve, 1932), pero para ello estos han de contener información muy precisa, visual, limpia, despertar interés y además ofrecer explicaciones (Sancho, 1996). A pesar de que a priori se pueda pensar que a las edades de los participantes los mapas son superfluos, recientes investigaciones (Dijk, Schee, Trimp & Zijpp, 1994;Gökçe, 2016;Piñeiro & Melón, 2002) aportan datos clarificadores sobre las serias dificultades que los estudiantes tienen a la hora de trabajar con mapas o ubicar determinados elementos geográficos en el espacio.…”