Geographical concepts: Their complexity and their grading

The study deals with the complexity of geographical concepts. It is based on questionnaires handed out to German students between 1987 and 1989. Complexity is defined by the number of elements needed for a full understanding and the relations between these elements. The study tries to verify the ability to reproduce complexity in different age groups. One result is that students are able to differentiate concepts with growing age. Another result is that specific media (for example: photographs, graphs, sketches, diagrams etc.) influence students to learn more successfully than others (for example: unstructured texts, tables, charts etc.). The more complex a concept is because of a large number of elements and relations needed to understand it, the less suitable it is for usage in teaching. Authors of geography textbooks should be far more aware of this difficulty and must therefore be asked to leave such concepts out. The same applies to syllabus commissions. A second round of questionnaires was therefore drafted and tested with the students that carefully circumvented all too complex concepts. The result was that indeed students succeeded in a far better way. Though the two rounds of questionnaires were concerned only with some climatological concepts the results can easily be transferred for any geographical subject matter.