From high school to postgraduate: student perceptions of learning experiences creating ArcGIS StoryMaps

ABSTRACT

This article presents a study evaluating student perceptions of learning experiences creating ArcGIS StoryMaps. The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom’s Taxonomy) provides a framework for organising, analysing, and interpreting a survey completed by 154 students from high school to postgraduate. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods we found student perceptions of the level of learning to be similar across education cohorts in the cognitive domain, exhibit some differences in psychomotor domain, and are markedly different in the affective domain. In terms of what they learned, postgraduates perceive the experience as being mostly about communicating ideas or storytelling more than undergraduates who, in addition, tend to see the experience as preparing maps and working with geographic information systems. Undergraduates tend to conflate gaining knowledge (cognitive) with learning skills (psychomotor), suggesting a greater focus on working with the technology. Most students across all education levels found the learning experience challenging and beneficial (affective) though some students did not. We conclude that while the creation of StoryMaps is good for student retention and offers an effective scaffolding framework for geography and GIS education, it is important for educators to design StoryMap learning activities using clearly defined learning outcomes and assessment rubrics.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital storytelling
• digital literacies
• student perceptions
• GIS education
• affective learning
• Taxonomy of educational objectives

Acknowledgements

We thank the students who contributed to this work by participating in the survey. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript for their thoughtful comments that helped improve the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Ethics statement and informed consent

Approval for conducting the survey was approved by Massey University Ethics Committee, through application SOB 21/41. All students who participated in the survey offered informed consent.