Expert Cognitive Model For Solving Geographical Location Problems In Real Situation

China’s new round of general high school geography curriculum standards proposes four core competencies,which aim to develop students’ comprehensive quality of observing,analyzing and explaining the geographical things or problems in real-world situation.This poses new challenges to the current geography teaching and evaluation in China.Based on the theories of problem solving and cognitive psychology,this study takes the geographical location problems in real-world situation as the research task,and uses the semi-structured interview method to collect the process information of experts to solve the geographical location problems.Then it forms the coding system integrating the problem solving process,domain knowledge and domain specific thinking methods.And finally it analyzes the cognitive processes and cognitive characteristics of expert geographical location problem solving.The study finds that the process of expert solving the geographical location problems is an iterative process of “evaluation-comparison”.During the iteration,the knowledge state of the problem is constantly transformed and gradually converged to the target state.The process is generally divided into three stages of “problem identification”,“problem representation and classification”,and “evaluation-comparison”,and during the process experts use some thinking methods and cognitive skills such as “regional cognition” and “comprehensive thinking”.The findings of this study can be used as a theoretical basis for further construction of a geographic core competencies evaluation framework in real-world situation.