7.1 Overview of Design & Summary of Primary Findings

This study has been primarily about spatial intelligence, and the extent to which it might be enhanced and improved.  One motivation for designing and carrying out this study has been my own experience as a geography teacher, which has helped me to appreciate Johnson’s (2000) caution that spatial relationships and representations which expert geographers often take for granted, can be difficult for novices in the discipline to grasp.  For example, map skills have always been an integral part of the discipline in which examination candidates are formally assessed.  A challenge for all geography teachers, regardless of experience, has been to help students form in their minds a three-dimensional understanding of a given place, using only the information from a two-dimensional topographic map.  

Over the decades, geography teachers have imaginatively devised all manner of tools to help their students bridge this dimensional gap, from the use of terrain models, to, more recently, landscape-rendering software, which can sometimes be expensive to procure.  An example of the latter is the Virtual Field Course (developed jointly in 1996 by the University of London, Leicester University and Oxford Brookes University).  This uses a client-server model to equip schools with tools for the analysis and visualization of terrain and urban structures.

It is hoped that one of the contributions that this particular study might make to the teaching of geography is that spatial intelligence might be improved through the relatively simple strategy of fieldtrips which focus specifically on developing students’ powers of observation – which, according to Johnson (2000) is “essential to understanding place”.  In the study, opportunities were given for these observations about place not only to be recorded, but also mediated with social constructions and reconstructions of the participants’ evolving understandings of their local environments.

This is congruent with Catling’s (unpbl.) contentions first that it is through social interaction and learning that individuals construct their understanding of the spatial world, and second that, crucially, “experience and interaction about the physical and social environment enables development of mental awareness of the spatial nature of the environment, which fosters imaginative exploration of spatial worlds.”  While it is acknowledged that there are a variety of aspects which constitute spatial intelligence, such as planar rotation, orientation and kinetic imagery (Gaughran, 1996), the decision was taken for the pre- and post-tests of the present study to focus solely on measuring the orientation aspect, given that it is this aspect which has the closest fit to the skills that students are required to employ when reading a map.

An analysis of the data from the pre- and post-test results of the main study would seem to bear out Catling’s suggestion that spatial awareness is built through movement within the environment, as well as through the discovery of how others see, understand and use the environment.  For example, among participants who successfully completed the orienteering task, Tables 15 and 16 show a significant improvement in both the time taken and the scores for the portion of the post-test which required them to match the rendered objects (mean time taken fell from 103.2 seconds to 76.7 seconds (significance = 0.000), while mean score increased from 3.5 to 3.8 (significance = 0.024)).

As they should, the pre- and post-tests bookended the intervention.  The latter was itself divided into two complementary halves, namely the orienteering task and the perspectives task.  As stated in Chapter Three, the orienteering task represented an attempt to hold constant the ‘landmarks’ (that is, the checkpoints) which punctuate the socially-constructed vista space.  This was so that the variable to be analysed would be more explicitly the nature of the discourse itself.

Conversely, the perspectives task represented an attempt to hold constant the nature of the discourse (by stipulating a highly structured format for debate – the Structured Academic Controversy), thereby permitting examination of the ‘meaningful landmarks’ variable, inter alia, instead.  In addition, the orienteering task served to familiarise participants with the respective neighbourhoods, so that their subsequent debate during the perspectives task would be more informed.  In particular, by stipulating a fixed route during the orienteering task, certain land-uses in the neighbourhoods which might have been relevant as evidence during the perspectives task could be implicitly drawn to the attention of participants (participants were only given the topic for debate on the day of the perspectives task itself, and not prior).

From a research design point-of-view, the study could have stood cohesively unto itself with the pre- and post-tests bookending the two-part field intervention, and no more.  However, from a pedagogical point-of-view the study needed closure, in order for the participants to consolidate their learning.  As such, two more components were added to the overall design, namely the peer critique and the presentation sessions.  

The purpose of the peer critique was to enable participants to benefit from the inputs of their peers with regards their preliminary investigations into the various neighbourhoods, in order that their final products – the PowerPoint presentations – be more rounded and considered.  Given the above, the rationale behind the presentation sessions is self-evident.  As things turned out, the hope that students would be able to make adequate sense and contribute constructive comments to each other during the gallery walk portion of the peer critique session, was naïvely optimistic for reasons detailed in Chapter Four, at least with respect to the nature of the comments given.

This section has described in broad strokes the methodology and key findings of the present research.  These findings will be elaborated upon in the following pages, with a view to informing one’s understanding of each of the four research questions first put forward in Chapter One, namely:
•    how do adolescents seek to explore and understand the local environment in which they find themselves?
•    how are such understandings of three-dimensional environments communicated, through text and pictures, with their peers?
•    what are the mechanisms (including textual and non-textual cues) which adolescents employ to coach their peers to successfully navigate alien environments?
•    how can the technologies of social software, specifically messaging technologies, augment and / or detract from the semiotic processes of making and sharing meaning about place?

<- 7 Conclusion          -> 7.2 Adolescent Explorations and Understandings of Local Environments