Developing Your Mental Map and Authentic Assessment

A geographic educator must have a well-developed understanding of place geography. This is part of geography, but not the end of it. Building and developing your understanding of where things are (countries, religions, capitals, cultures, physical features etc.) is part of your life-time commitment to geography education.

As a way to begin to explore authentic assessment (This site may give you some information that will help you on this topic) we will have a series of 15-20 minute quizes on different regions of the world. For the last region of the world we study the assignment will be to make up a quiz (see below).

Quiz 1: September 13 North America

Quiz 2: October 4 Latin America

Quiz 3: November 1 Africa

Quiz 4: November 20 Europe

Quiz 5: Asia. Due Deceber 6. You will make up a quiz following this procedure

• develop a list of significant place names and features (traits) for Asia,
• justify your list, and
• produce an authentic assessment which could be used to measure student knowledge. Be sure to include an answer sheet or grading rubric with correct answers.

This assignment will be handed in on paper. That makes the use of maps and other pieces of information easier for you. Target college students as your "class." Think about what you and other fellow teachers have to know about the geography of Asia in order to be effective educators.

We will be discussing authentic assessment in class.. See also Gersmehl (7-8-12).

Be sure to read carefully what Gersmehl (7-2, 7-3) has to say about what locations and other images and features are important to learn about a place.

• You are going to have to decide on placenames first. Which are SO important that they should be included in the material you will teach and then evaluated?
• Then, you must decide on which traits of places in your region should students be taught and tested upon. Gersmehl asks, "What specific lists of crops, landforms, religious denominations, house types, soils, clothing styles, factories, and so forth should be associated with specific places and at what scale?"

You may use World Discovery as a beginning point, but that will not help you to decide the traits most significant for students to know. You will have to do some research to find that out....get on the web..go to the library...This will help you to develop your justification, the second part of the assignment.

The justification should address the issue of "why do I have to learn this?" As a teacher, you will often be asked this question (I'll bet right now you are saying, "Bednarz, why do I have to do this?") so this is a beginning of your answer...you should always have a sense of WHY you are asking a student to do something. So you might say, "These cities are the capitals and also the sites of the largest airports in the region, therefore, commercial, political, and economic nodes." Or to justify a list of physical features, you might write, "The news is filled with stories related to religious differences in this region, so I feel it is relevant and worthwhile for students to know the pattern of religious distribution."

The third part of the assignment is the authentic assessment. Authentic means linked to a real-world task, something you might have to do as an adult. Other words used to describe authentic assessments are meaningful, provoking thought, in-context, engaging, requiring a performance.

Remember, you are rarely asked to label a blank outline map in the real world, but you might...

• in conversation, want to describe your honeymoon cruise through the Caribbean using a sketch map on the back of a cocktail napkin.
• need to plan a speaking tour or sales campaign and need to know the location of significant American cities to decide where to go and in which order.
• be watching a hockey game and want to know where most of the Canadian national hockey team players are from...as they list their hometowns, you mentally create a little distribution map in your mind (mental map!)
• as you read a newspaper story about internal turmoil in Mexico, relate where the troubled areas are to places you know, might have visited, plan to visit or where students in your class are from.

Do you get my point? Knowing about places is a real world skill. Your tests should reflect the needs of the real world.

You might also want kids to sketch maps....great way to develop a sense of where places are....

Reflect on your own learning style. How do you best learn about the geography of places? How could you best show what you have learned?

Due December 6.

In addition, you should become familiar with the information presented in Gersmehl, Appendix 2.