Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-13T01:19:57.035Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Children's knowledge of countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2009

By
Martyn Barrett ,
Evanthia Lyons  and
Alison Bourchier-Sutton
Edited by
Christopher Spencer  and
Mark Blades
Christopher Spencer
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Mark Blades
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

In this chapter, we review the research literature on children's geographical knowledge about countries. During the course of their development, children acquire a large body of knowledge about countries: they learn about the existence, location, size and shape of many different countries, they learn about the natural and man-made features (e. g. mountain ranges, rivers, coastlines, cities, etc.) which characterize some of these countries, and they learn about some of these countries' climates and their flora and fauna. This chapter reviews the research which has been conducted into children's acquisition of such knowledge. We begin by discussing children's knowledge of the geography of their own country.

Children's knowledge of their own country

Piagetian research

Piaget (1928; Piaget and Weil, 1951) was the first researcher to conduct research in this field. His investigations, conducted with four to fifteen-year-old Swiss Genevan children, led him to propose that children's large-scale geographical knowledge exhibited three stages of development (following a pre-stage of ignorance before five years of age). The first stage lasted from five to seven–eight years of age: between these ages, Piaget and Weil found that children were able to name their own country, and were able to state when questioned verbally that the city in which they lived was located within this country. However, these children were unable to depict the correct spatial inclusion relationship between the city and the country in their drawings (typically drawing them side by side, rather than one within the other), and failed to understand the conceptual inclusion relationship that they themselves were simultaneously both Genevese and Swiss.

Type
Chapter
Information
Children and their Environments
Learning, Using and Designing Spaces
 , pp. 57 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Axia, G. and Bremner, J. G. (1992). Children's understanding of Europe: British and Italian points of view. Paper presented at the Fifth European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Seville, Spain, September 1992.Google Scholar
Axia, , , G., Bremner, J. G., Deluca, P. and Andreasen, G. (1998). Children drawing Europe: The effects of nationality, age and teaching. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 16, 423–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, M. (1996). English children's acquisition of a European identity. In Breakwell, G. and Lyons, E. (eds.), Changing European Identities: Social Psychological Analyses of Social Change (pp. 349–69). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. (in press). Children's Knowledge, Beliefs and Feelings about Nations and National Groups. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Barrett, M. and Davey, K. (2001). English children's sense of national identity and their attachment to national geography. Unpublished paper, Department of Psychology, University of Surrey.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. and Farroni, T. (1996). English and Italian children's knowledge of European geography. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14, 257–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, M., Lyons, E., Bennett, M., Vila, I., Giménez, A., Arcuri, L. and de Rosa, A. S. (1997). Children's beliefs and feelings about their own and other national groups in Europe. Final Report to the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-General XII for Science, Research and Development, Human Capital and Mobility (HCM) Programme, Research Network No. CHRX-CT94–0687.
Barrett, M., Lyons, E., Purkhardt, C. and Bourchier, A. (1996). English children's representations of European geography. End of Award Report to ESRC, Research Grant No. R000235753. Guildford: University of Surrey.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. and Whennell, S. (1998). The relationship between national identity and geographical knowledge in English children. Poster presented at XVth Biennial Meeting of ISSBD, Berne, Switzerland.Google Scholar
Bourchier, A., Barrett, M. and Lyons, E. (2002). The predictors of children's geographical knowledge of other countries. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22, 79–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Department of Education and Science (1991). Geography in the National Curriculum. London: HMSO.
Downs, R. M., Liben, L. S. and Daggs, D. G. (1988). On education and geographers: The role of cognitive developmental theory in geographic education. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78, 680–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giménez, A., Belmonte, L., Garcia-Claros, E., Suarez, E. and Barrett, M. (1997). Acquisition of geographical knowledge. Poster presented at the 7th European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, Athens, Greece, August 1997.Google Scholar
Gould, P. R. (1973). The black boxes of Jönköping: Spatial information and preference. In Downs, R. M. and Stea, D. (eds.), Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behaviour (pp. 235–45). Chicago: Aldine.Google Scholar
Holloway, S. L. and Valentine, G. (2000). Corked hats and Coronation Street: British and New Zealand children's imaginative geographies of the other. Childhood, 7, 335–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jahoda, G. (1962). Development of Scottish children's ideas and attitudes about other countries. Journal of Social Psychology, 58, 91–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jahoda, G. (1963). The development of children's ideas about country and nationality, Part I: The conceptual framework. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 33, 47–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jahoda, G. (1964). Children's concepts of nationality: A critical study of Piaget's stages. Child Development, 35, 1081–92.Google ScholarPubMed
Jahoda, G. and Woerdenbagch, A. (1982). Awareness of supra-national groupings among Dutch and Scottish children and adolescents. European Journal of Political Research, 10, 305–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaspers, J. M. F., Geer, J. P., Tajfel, H. and Johnson, N. (1972). On the development of national attitudes in children. European Journal of Social Psychology, 2, 347–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, N. (1966). What do children learn from war comics? New Society, 8, 7–12.Google Scholar
Johnson, N. (1973). Development of English children's concept of Germany. Journal of Social Psychology, 90, 259–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, N., Middleton, M. and Tajfel, H. (1970). The relationship between children's preferences for and knowledge about other nations. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 9, 232–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laeng, M. (ed.) (1985). I Nuovi Programmi della Scuola Elementare (3rd edition). Rome: Giunti and Lisciani.Google Scholar
Middleton, M., Tajfel, H. and Johnson, N. (1970). Cognitive and affective aspects of children's national attitudes. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 9, 122–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moss, N. and Blades, M. (1994). Travel doesn't broaden the mind. Poster presented at the Annual Conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Portsmouth, September 1994.Google Scholar
Nugent, J. K. (1994). The development of children's relationships with their country. Children's Environments, 11, 281–91.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1928). Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piaget, J. and Weil, A. M. (1951). The development in children of the idea of the homeland and of relations to other countries. International Social Science Journal, 3, 561–78.Google Scholar
Piché, D. (1981). The spontaneous geography of the urban child. In Herbert, D. T. and Johnston, R. J. (eds.), Geography and the Urban Environment: Progress in Research and Applications, vol. iv (pp. 229–56). Chichester: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Rutland, A. (1998). English children's geo-political knowledge of Europe. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 16, 439–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stillwell, R. and Spencer, C. (1973). Children's early preferences for other nations and their subsequent acquisition of knowledge about those nations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 345–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tajfel, H. (1966). Children and foreigners. New Society, 7, 9–11.Google Scholar
Wiegand, P. (1991a). The ‘known world’ of primary school children. Geography, 76, 143–9.Google Scholar
Wiegand, P. (1991b). Does travel broaden the mind? Education, 3, 54–8.Google Scholar
Wiegand, P. (1995). Young children's freehand sketch maps of the world. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 4, 19–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilberg, S. (2002). Preschoolers' cognitive representations of their homeland. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 157–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×