Children’s representations of the Earth. The role of geographical knowledge
Type de matériel :
88
Children’s representations of the Earth and their evolution throughout schooling can be explained by two main theories. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) assume that children’s knowledge is organized into mental models embedded in presuppositions, and diSessa (1988) assumes that intuitive knowledge is a fragmented set of ideas. Both theories focus solely on the spatial aspect (flat Earth with a top and a bottom, spherical Earth with a bottom and a top, etc.), in which the Earth is considered to be a sphere with a uniform surface. In the present study, the general hypothesis is that the geographical information depicted on the globe and the geographical knowledge it mobilizes have an impact on representations of the Earth from the start of elementary school. Sixty children (aged six to eleven) were asked to answer questions (“what is the shape of the Earth?” or “can we live here or there?”) and to perform more complex tasks (linking a globe to a map, imagining a route from one point to another) either with a normal globe (with the seas and continents depicted) or with a blank globe. The results confirm the decisive role of geographical information in the representations of the Earth that children develop to carry out the proposed tasks and show that the development of these representations mobilizes spatial and astronomical knowledge (the Earth is spherical) as well as geographical knowledge (the countries or continents spread across its surface). These results encourage interdisciplinary teaching activities in the classroom.
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