Maps in classrooms *.

Reading maps is an important life skill. It is not surprising, therefore, that skills relating to the reading and interpretation of maps should feature prominently in the curriculum of Australian schools. This article looks at the theoretical basis on which decisions about map-related learning are made by educators; the manner in which mapping skills have been integrated into the curriculum of New South Wales, Australia's most populous state; and the skill-based instructional sequence used by teachers to develop students' map-related abilities.

THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING THROUGH MAPS

The process by which map-related skills are allocated to specific stages of learning by curriculum writers, and the instructional sequence typically employed by classroom teachers (see Figure 1), is determined by our understanding of how, and at what rate, young people learn.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

While there are many theories of cognitive development, Meadows (1993) suggests that three of these are particularly relevant when considering cognition in childhood: Piaget's model of cognitive development; the information-processing models of cognitive development; and the neo-Vygotskian models of cognitive development. Within this overall framework, Liben (1981) identifies a suite of perspectives that seek to explain the development of childhood spatial cognition. Matthews (1992) organises these into three components: nativism, empiricism and constructivism. The latter has come to occupy a central place in the teaching of subjects such as Science and Mathematics (Leder, 1993; Driver et al., 1994) and has the potential to impact on the teaching of mapping in Geography. Such an approach, however, necessitates a paradigm shift in Geography teaching--a shift from a positivist epistemology of descriptive Geography (map reading) to a constructivist paradigm that recognises that "everything is constructed" (Clary, 1996, p. 24). The cognitive acceleration program (Leat, 2002) is an example of the ways mapping has been used to explore the notion of constructivist thinking and learning.

PIAGET'S LEGACY

The most influential of the theories of cognitive development emanate from the work of Piaget. While some Geography teachers have misused Piaget's body of work--especially in their unwavering acceptance of the fixed stages and subsequent under-estimation of student abilities to learn through maps--it still has much that is of value. For example, the marrying of mental age to a series of stages underpins the work of Boardman (1983). In this particular instance, Piaget's concepts of topological, projective and Euclidean space sequence are used to determine the teaching of map work from primary school through to the end of secondary school. Similarly, Blachford (1978) uses Piaget's model of stages to develop a sequence of map-related tasks appropriate for Geography students. Such approaches are commendable. Students in primary schools, for example, benefit from starting to learn about maps in a concrete manner using the classroom, school grounds and immediate environs (Weeden, 2002). Moving towards more abstract mapping in these early years is more problematic in Piagetian terms. To be fair to Piaget, however, he did not intend his series of stages to be regarded as a teaching model. It was exclusively a model concerned with the cognitive development of the 'normal' epistematic subject.