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