Performance of Senior Secondary Students in Basic Map Work Skills
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Date
1992-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Being components of the overall geographic education,
mapwork skills are means to the deep understanding of the
other components. As a result, geographic education, whatever
the level be, can not be complete without the mastery of at
least the basic mapwork skills. Review of literature reveals
that this fact is duely recognized by professional geographers,
geography educators and curriculum experts including
the Social Sciences Panel of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education.
However, whether or not students in our schools have
really developed such skills was not discovered up to the
present . This study was aimed at the investigation of the
extent to which students of Addis Ababa developed the basic
mapwork skills by the time they complete their secondary
education.
A performa nce test was prepared and administered to 150
sample students of four government and two mission schools.
Data relating to the overall academic performance of the
students was acquired from the record offices of the concerned
schools. The students also filled in questionnaires meant to
gather information about the progress and problems ofiiiteaching
mapwork skills in their res pective schools. Similar
questionnaires were prepared to be filled in by geography
teachers of the same schools. Besides filling in the questionnaires,
Geography Department Heads and two most senior teachers
of geography were interviewed.
The data analysis revealed that the performance of
students in basic mapwork skills is very low. Most of them
were not able to answer correctly even half of the items in
the test. The performance of students of mission schools was
relatively better than that of students of government schools.
The study also suggested that performance in mapwork skills is
positively correlated with students' achievement in mathematics,
geography and their grand average.
Among the factors that negatively affected achievement
in mapwork skills are found to be the chronic scarcity of
teaching aids, shortage of time, unfavourable classroom
conditions, lack of sufficient knowledge about mapwork skills
on the part of the teachers, lack of interest on the part of
the stud ents, and poor content structure of the map-reading
textbooks being used.
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Keywords
Performance of Senior