Students’ Geographic Skills in Indonesia: Evaluating Learning Material Questions about GIS Using Taxonomy of Spatial Thinking

Abstract

Geographic skills is a major competency which must be developed through spatial thinking. This paper describes whether learning material questions about Geographic Information System (GIS) in geography textbooks contains components of spatial thinking, namely: concepts of space, using tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. Evaluation of learning material questions about GIS was conducted on four geography textbooks of senior high schools in Indonesia by coding using taxonomy of spatial thinking. The questions evaluated in this study were 92 questions which contained in assignment, multiple choice and essay practice questions. The result showed that the majority of learning material questions about GIS is not based on spatial thinking perspective with 71 percent of questions is non-spatial, 73 percent of questions is not using maps to represent spatial thinking, and 67 percent of questions is low level of reasoning process (input). These findings indicate that learning material questions about GIS in geography textbooks do not include the whole component of spatial thinking. As a result, it causes learning material questions about GIS in geography textbooks become less of developing geography competency. Learning material questions should contain the components of spatial thinking at high level, such as using complex-spatial on concepts of space, using tools for representation and using output for processes of reasoning. Therefore, the National Education Standards Agency has to determine standardized questions in geographic textbooks that focus on spatial concepts to represent high-level spatial thinking