The Study On The Construction Of Mental Maps In Geography Learning In Junior School Students

Mental map is the relative geographic information which reflects in human brain and constructing the mental map is an important approach to effectively promote the geography study. The study of junior school students constructing the mental map is helpful to learn about the detailed mental process of students learning the map, which will provide important reference for teachers to choose to optimize the map teaching strategy.This thesis firstly adopted the literature method to analyze and conclude the relative research and the latest progress of mental map at home and abroad. And secondly, taking the hand-painted diagram as the measurement tool, 75 middle school students in H Junior School in Lanzhou were measured to know about their constructing ability of mental map. And finally, the above students were divided into regular class and experimental class and meanwhile the thesis compared the teaching effect of these two classes.The study found that:(1) the experimental class which used the mental map to learn geography was significantly better than the regular class;(2) constructing the mental map to learn geography helped to stimulate students’ interest in geography learning;(3) drawing training could effectively improve students’ ability to construct the mental map;(4) changing the presentation way of the map could help students who were weak to improve learning effect.Based on the above study, this thesis puts forward some detailed suggestions about how to construct the mental map for junior school students:(1) strengthen the training of the students’ ability of spatial perception;(2) cultivate students the geography learning methods of drawing diagram;(3) guide the students to learn to change the presentation way of the map.