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ABSTRACT
It has long been understood that widespread place name ignorance exists among the youth of today. The present study compares place location knowledge among students in a Swedish town in 2013 with the knowledge in the same town 45 years earlier. The study used outline maps to determine the ability to locate geographic names. A total of 1,124 students were included in the study in 2013, and the results are compared with the results from a previous study of 1,200 students conducted in 1968. The results indicate that contemporary children have improved knowledge of continents and oceans on a world map but have worse knowledge of countries and other locations on a map of Europe. These changes indicate neither a general improvement nor a worsening of place location knowledge but rather an adaptation to contemporary society, in which children travel to and receive news from many parts of the world and in which detailed geographic information is easily obtained.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the editors and the reviewers for valuable comments on my paper. I also want to thank all of the student participants in Arvika for their contribution and extend many thanks to Christian Persman of Arvika and to the principals and teachers in Arvika who helped me distribute the questionnaires. Finally, I greatly appreciate the support of Ulf Jansson, Bo Malmberg, and other colleagues at Stockholm University, both at the Department of Human Geography and at the Centre for Teaching and Learning in the Social Sciences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.