The Impact of Teaching Geographical Causal Diagrams on Students’ Geographical Interrelationships Thinking

Abstract

Thinking about the interactions among geographical elements, referred to here as geographical interrelationships thinking, is a crucial part of geographical synthetic thinking. Causal diagrams are commonly employed in geography to cultivate students’ geographical synthetic thinking. To test the hypothesis that teaching with geographical causal diagrams can enhance students’ geographical interrelationships thinking, the author designed a teaching experiment. A total of 37 high school students participated in the one-month four-lesson teaching experiment. The results showed a significant improvement in students’ geographical interrelationships thinking. There was a significant positive correlation between students’ proficiency in drawing causal diagrams and their geographical interrelationships thinking.

Keywords:

• Geographical synthetic thinking
• geographical interrelationships thinking
• causal diagram
• geographical causal diagram

Acknowledgments

We thank the 37 students who participated in this study for completing the experiment under difficult conditions and providing indispensable data for the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is one of the achievements of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Year 2019 Funding Project “Measurement, Development Mechanism, and Experimental Research of Key Competences Teaching Intention of Middle School Teachers” (approval number: 19YJA880042).

Notes on contributors

Chunyu Ma

Chunyu Ma is a master student of College of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. At the same time, she is a teacher of The Ninth High School of Pingdu City, Qingdao, Shandong, China. Her research focuses on geography education and synthetic thinking. She is also responsible for research design and implementation, experiment implementation, data provision and analysis, and thesis writing.

Xiaoxu Lu

Xiaoxu Lu is an associate professor of College of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. His research focuses on geography education, spatial thinking, human geography. He is the corresponding author and he is responsible for research design and overall control.