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ERIC Number: EJ1016219
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1436-4522
EISSN: N/A
Effects of Thinking Style and Spatial Ability on Anchoring Behavior in Geographic Information Systems
Wang, Dai-Yi; Lee, Mei-Hsuan; Sun, Chuen-Tsai
Educational Technology & Society, v16 n3 p1-13 2013
The authors propose an instructional use for Google Earth (a GIS application) as an anchoring tool for knowledge integration. Google Earth can be used to support student explorations of world geography based on Wikipedia articles on earth science and history topics. We asked 66 Taiwanese high-school freshmen to make place marks with explanatory notes and summaries (known as anchors) to serve as geographic references; they used anchors that were predefined by their teacher for subsequent geographic searches. Our investigation focused on the processes used to create anchors, how the students used anchors to perform search tasks, and the roles of thinking style and spatial ability on learning processes and performance. The 671 generated anchors were categorized as direct, indirect, symbolic, temporal, spatial, and challenging. According to our results, students with legislative thinking style tendencies created the largest number of anchors but rarely used them for subsequent search tasks; executive-style students tended to make symbolic and temporal spatial geographic references and regularly used the teacher-created anchors and the anchors created by judicial-style students were evenly distributed across all categories. In addition, low-spatial ability students tended to create direct geographic references and to use predefined anchors for all problem types.
International Forum of Educational Technology & Society. Athabasca University, School of Computing & Information Systems, 1 University Drive, Athabasca, AB T9S 3A3, Canada. Tel: 780-675-6812; Fax: 780-675-6973; Web site: http://www.ifets.info
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: High Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Taiwan
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A