Draw me a Map of Your Town - Exploring Children's Knowledge of Local Physical Environments Through Free-recall Sketch Mapping

This paper presents the results and provisional findings of an investigation of children's knowledge of local physical environments. This was done through a series of mapping exercises conducted at three (3) primary... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents the results and provisional findings of an investigation of children's knowledge of local physical environments. This was done through a series of mapping exercises conducted at three (3) primary schools in the south eastern United Kingdom. These exercises firstly examined the ability of children to extract information from maps using standard cartographic conventions. As such it built on the work of Blaut and Stea (1997) in finding that children of this age were quite capable of identifying objects and land use types.  The second exercise examined the types of objects and relationships depicted by forty (40) children aged 7-9 years to investigate the veracity of the universal spatial typology proposed by Lynch (1960). Both exercises were video and audio recorded so that the children could explain their sketch maps as they were constructed. This was considered important as the work of Hart (1979-1981) suggests post-factum interpretation of children's maps without such interaction runs serious risk of underestimating child capability. The children's artefact maps were then graded using typologies utilised by Ladd (1970), Moore (1973), Hart (1981) and Matthews (1984)

Preliminary findings suggest that the children were all capable of identifying the nominated features from a supplied map and 98% were able to construct a recognisable artefact map within 15 minutes. Although the artefact maps often appeared chaotic, they in fact showed quite detailed amounts of environmental knowledge possessed by the children. It appears from this study that there is a need to develop a new typology for classification of young children's artefact maps as the majority of maps in this study spanned multiple categories in each typology.

Keywords : Children, Artefact mapping, environmental knowledge, spatial typology