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2004 NSF K-12 Math, Science, and Technology Curriculum Developers Conference

Children's Misconceptions about the Correspondences between a Map and the Represented Space

Kim Kastens

In an earlier Instructional Materials Development project, colleagues and I developed software and curriculum materials ("Where are We?") to help elementary school children learn to "translate" back and forth between a map and the terrain represented by the map. To assess whether these materials had been effective, we developed field-based map skills assessments in which children place colored stickers on a paper map to indicate the location of a similarly-colored flag in the represented space (the world-to-map task) and place colored markers on the ground to indicate the location of similarly-colored stickers on a paper map (the map-to-world task). In our current Applied Research project, collaborator Lynn Liben and I are using these and other field-based and classroom-based map skills assessments to document and analyze the nature of the mistakes that children make in understanding the correspondences between a map and the represented space, especially those mistakes that persist after the use of "Where are We?". Our field-based assessments are unusual in the map-skills literature because our field area is outdoors, relatively large (approximately 180m x 230m), and cannot all be seen simultaneously from any single vantage point; thus it is more like a geologist's or ecologist's field area than the room-sized study areas typical of cognitive studies of map use. Our preliminary analysis suggests the following types of errors or misconceptions:

• Failure to understand the representational correspondence between map and represented space (e.g., for a flag that was on a building, child places sticker in the middle of the lawn on the map)
• Failure to understand the configurational correspondence between the map and the represented space (e.g.: for a flag that was on a building, child places sticker on a building symbol on the map, but the wrong building)
• Failure to achieve directional correspondence between map and represented space (e.g. for a flag that was on a path along the east side of a square building, the child places the sticker on the map in the mirror-image position, on the west side the building).

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. ESI-0352345). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.