This research describes how enrolling students in an afterschool Geography Club affects their perception of the discipline and their geographic literacy. The creation of the afterschool club at this particular school came out of the recognition of the need to increase students' exposure to geographical content. The results of this study show the…

This article describes the benefits of combining field-based learning within the context of a competitive setting in the geography curriculum. Findings and data are presented based on experiences gathered from teaching an upper-level university geography course that combined geographic techniques and theory into a game of capture-the-flag.…

Functional literacy is important in both English/language arts and geography. Using the "found poetry" strategy, students will summarize a piece of text, identify main ideas and find geographic connections. While using young adult literature is a great way to incorporate geography into English/language arts classroom, understanding of geography…

Popular music can be used to study many subjects and issues related to the social sciences. "Geographies of American Popular Music" was a workshop that not only examined the history and development of select genres of American music, it also introduced students to basic geographic concepts such as the culture hearth and spatial diffusion. Through…

Music informs understandings of place and is an excellent vehicle for teaching cultural geography. A study was developed of geography students' perception of where music genres predominate in the United States. Its approach, involving mental map exercises, reveals the usefulness and importance of maps as an iterative process in teaching cultural…

The purpose of this study is to explore students' understanding levels and misconceptions about temperature and factors affecting it. The concept of the study was chosen from Geography National Curriculum. In this study, a questionnaire was developed after a pilot study with an aim to ascertain the students' understanding levels of temperature and…

Aerial imagery has a great capacity to engage and maintain student interest while providing a contextual setting to strengthen their ability to reason proportionally. Free, on-demand, high-resolution, large-scale aerial photography provides both a bird's eye view of the world and a new perspective on one's own community. This article presents an…

Through an instructional approach, this article offers a template for a classroom-based geography capstone course grounded in pedagogical elements of synthesis and reflection, as based on exploration of ten key geographic ideas. It provides insights into course goals, structure, and components for instructors who may wish to implement it in…

Consistent with developments in American education pedagogy, geography educators have made great strides exploring a wide range of high- and low-tech methods for teaching and learning geographic concepts. This article draws on a qualitative analysis of essays in which college students discuss tenets of the National Geography Standards in the…

This document provides the framework to guide the development of the assessment instruments for the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in geography. Altogether, four documents will be designed to guide the geography assessment and this Assessment Framework is the first. This framework is designed to assess the outcomes of…

Environmental change is ideally taught through field observations; however, leaving the classroom is often unrealistic due to financial and logistical constraints. The Internet offers several feasible alternatives using webcams that instructors can use to illustrate a variety of geographic examples and exercises for students. This article explores…

Geography, as with all subjects, has a set of organising principles and concepts. One of the central concepts which underpins the subject is that of place. However, it is very much the case that this is an evolving concept, which has taken on a number of guises over time. This paper reviews some of the major changes in perspectives on place as a…

The Center for Global Geography Education (CGGE) is a set of online modules exploring geographic issues, which allow collaborative analysis and discussion between international teams of undergraduates. Using data from trials held in 10 countries, the modules' effectiveness in improving student understanding of geographic concepts and appreciation…

Greenways are prominent features of many urban landscapes and synthesize several geographic topics: human-environment interactions, urban ecosystems, and the promotion of sustainability within riverine corridors. Greenways are easily accessible and provide an opportunity for students at various grade levels to study interactions across physical…

This article examines whether questions embedded in geography textbooks address three components of spatial thinking: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking was developed and used to evaluate questions in four high school level geography textbooks. The results…