Development and Evaluation of <i>“Where are We?”</i> Map-Skills Software and Curriculum

The Where are We? software and lessons are designed to help children in grades two through four learn to “translate” between the visually-perceived world that they sense around them, and the schematic representation of that landscape on a map. Formative evaluation of a prototype version of Where are We? resulted in the following improvements in the instructional materials: more and prompter feedback for students, additional assessment tools for teachers, development of lessons to model successful map-using strategies, development of lessons to overcome common misconceptions, and replacement of text-based instructions with a voiceover demo. To evaluate whether the skills practiced in Where are We? transfer to a real-world setting, we have developed field-based tests of the ability to absorb information in the real world and transfer it onto a ma and, conversely, the ability to absorb information from a map and transfer it into an action in the real world. In our reality-to-map test, students place colored stickers on a map to indicate the location of similarly colored flags in the real world; in the map-to-reality test, students place large, colored, numbered disks on the ground to indicate the location of similarly-colored, numbered stickers on a map. Average performance for a class of 24 fourth graders improved on both the map-to-reality and reality-to-map tests after using Where are We? Some children classified with learning disabilities performed extremely well both with the software and on the field-tests, supporting the idea that spatial skills are not closely connected to the verbal skills usually emphasized by school tasks. The persistence of certain kinds of misconceptions on the post-test, and the uneven improvement of subscores representing different aspects of map-to-reality correspondence, suggest directions for improvement in Where are We?