The Application Of GIS In Developing High School Student’s Geospatial Thinking Ability

The cultivation of the geospatial thinking ability is the key to learn geography. Generally, the spatial thinking ability of high school student is weak, and it will be an obstacle for these students。Geographic information system (GIS) which features powerful spatial query, displaying, spatial analysis and visualization functions will be an effective tool to cultivate high school students’ spatial thinking ability.The studies on utilizing GIS to developing high school students’ geospatial thinking ability at home and abroad were few, and most of them were still theoretical. Related works in the field mainly focused on the following aspects, such as the conception of geospatial thinking, the influent factors of geospatial thinking, the application of GIS in geography teaching and so on. It is the key of this thesis to utilizing GIS to cultivate high school students’ geospatial thinking ability. In this paper, a wide range of theoretical basis were offered for researches of utilizing GIS to developing high school student’s geospatial thinking ability, which can improve the ability of student’s geospatial thinking as well as the grades of geography. The conception of the geospatial thinking ability was defined as "The geospatial thinking ability refers to such kind of ability utilizing the spatial visualization of geographical thing to build the space image of geographic things, and then for geographic positioning, analysis and expression, and thus to better summarize the laws of geography". According to the connotation definition of geospatial thinking and the practical situation of geography teaching, the paper elaborated from geospatial positioning capability, geospatial contrast capability, geospatial analysis capabilities, geospatial integrated analysis capabilities. At current, there are still difficulties in traditional geography teaching in geospatial positioning, geospatial analysis and demonstration of geography law, and taking fully use of spatial query, spatial analysis and spatial visualization of GIS can effectively resolve these problems, and then to better cultivate students’geospatial thinking ability. Three teaching sample are given to illustrate how to use GIS in practical geography teaching and how GIS improve the teaching effect.At last, the validity of utilizing GIS to developing high school students’ geospatial thinking ability were verified by questionnaire.