ABSTRACT
An Empirical Study of Students’ Development as Spatial Thinkers In this section, we empirically show which strategies students use to learn GIS, and further, how a certain teaching practice influences the students’ process of becoming spatial thinkers. This is done by analysing the group of first-year geography students at the Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, attending the course: GIS and Cartography. Copenhagen University is a research intensive University with approximately 35 000
students. The geography department is located at the Faculty of Science and is one out of three places you can study geography at university level in Denmark; GIS were introduced into the curriculum in the late 1980s. A course in ‘Introduction to GIS’ first served as a non-compulsory, technically oriented course at masters’ level. Through the years, it has gradually been moved to bachelors’ level. Finally, in 2002 it was placed as a mandatory introductory course for all first-year geography students at the University. The course (now named ‘GIS and Cartography’) gives the students an introduction and first-hand experience with GIS and is supplemented by six elective GIS courses placed later in the geography curriculum. This change also reflects the increasingly important role GIS play in the international and national communities of geographers. The students enter the study of geography with a broad range of educational
backgrounds and there are requirements of mathematical skills. All of the students have been trained in spatial thinking through their high school; however, only very few have specific experience with GIS when they enter university. A recent study has shown that the students are remarkably identical when it comes to economic status, ethnicity and family educational background, as well as region of origin (Lorenzen, 2010). Other aspects, such as the students’ different IT skills, may have influenced the students’ strategies. This has not been systematically tested in the present study, but could be so in the future to explore further why some students prefer certain strategies when approaching GIS.
