Which children can find a way through a strange town using a streetmap? – results of an empirical study on children's orientation competence

Map Skills in Education: A Systematic Review of Terminology, Methodology, and Influencing Factors

“…For example, the results of Chang & Antes (1987) study show that males performed significantly better than females in reference and topographic map use, but not in street map use. At odds with many other studies which found that male participants had a higher level of map skills than female participants (Eve et al, 1994;Hemmer et al, 2013;Lim, 2005;Malinowski & Gillespie, 2001), Aksoy (2013) found either no differences between male and female participants or that some operations falling under map reading were significantly in favour of female participants. Considered together, therefore, the results of the studies show that gender interacts with other factors which should be taken into account both when designing the study and when interpreting and comparing the results.…”

“…Generally, however, there are no substantial differences in the research instruments used, because suitable use of tests or questionnaires consisting of tasks/questions and maps usually suffices to identify most map skills and it is therefore not surprising that they predominate (e.g., Chang & Antes, 1987;Clark et al, 2008;Michaelidou, Nakos, & Filippakopoulou, 2004;Ooms et al, 2015;Teck, 1989;Trifonoff, 1995;van Dijk et al, 1994). Tests and questionnaires are often created by the authors based on theoretical knowledge or curriculum requirements, but there are also studies which have made use of preexisting and therefore tested tools (Aksoy, 2013;Hemmer et al, 2013;Sholl & Egeth, 1982;Ugodulunwa & Wakjissa, 2015;van der Schee & van Dijk, 1999).…”

“…Of the specific operations, the most popular were without doubt route planning, navigation and self-location on a map (Aksoy, 2013;Alhosani & Yagoub, 2015;Griffin, 1995;Griffin & Griffin, 1996;Hemmer et al, 2013;Lim, 2005;Logan et al, 2014;Malinowski & Gillespie, 2001), which fall under map analysis skills. In contrast, numeric map scale use, another map analysis skill, was rarely tested (Aksoy, 2013;Grofelnik & Pap, 2013;Hanus & Marada, 2016;Hemmer et al, 2013). The individual operations constituting map interpretation and drawing skills (see Figure 1) have been researched similarly often.…”

“…For example, ability to determine geographic coordinates was researched only by Aksoy (2013) and Grofelnik & Pap (2013). While, in contrast, research focused very frequently on symbol and colour discrimination and decoding (Alhosani & Yagoub, 2015;Barker et al, 1986;Gilmartin & Shelton, 1989;Ishikawa, 2016;Liebenberg, 1998;Ooms et al, 2015) and on the locating objects on a map (Beatty & Tröster, 1987;Clark et al, 2008;Eve, Price, & Counts, 1994;Hemmer et al, 2013;Kastens & Liben, 2010). Some authors do not take differences between individual subsets of map skills into account in their empirical studies and state that their goal is to identify general level of map skills (Bein, 1990;Bein et al, 2009;Grofelnik & Pap, 2013;Henrie et al, 1997;Kelly et al, 1987;Livni & Bar, 2001;Nelson et al, 1996).…”

“…Only map background complexity has been proven to significantly influence the ability to analyse maps (Michaelidou et al, 2004). It can be said that map analysis especially involves factors which can be generally summarised as being associated with spatial abilities and skills or spatial imagination (general spatial reasoning, previous experience of a spatial task and the method of landform representation) (Hemmer et al, 2013;Ishikawa, 2016;Liben et al, 2013;Malinowski & Gillespie, 2001;van Dijk et al, 1994).…”