Young Children's Development Of Map Ability And Its Educational Implications

Map carries the experiences to explore the world by human being; map is the results of awareness of the external environment and objects around, as well as tools for people to realize the external environment and objects around. This study first investigated the value of maps, with participants of preschool children from Shanghai, and depicted young children's development of map ability and its educational implications.Based on former researches, the present study carried out in two ways:First, the study on young children's development of map ability. 90 children of 3.5-5.5 years old have been randomly chosen from one average kindergarten of Shanghai's urban area as participants. The study investigated the development of young children's map ability by interview and experiment. Meanwhile, children's oral reports and responds have been discussed to find their strategy-selection.The results show that young children have already possessed preliminary map ability. On the development of map understanding, most children have been able to understand the space representational properties of map. On map the development of map use, children's ability of map use improved with age, beginning to show the skilled map users' ability of orientation and correspondence. On the strategy-selection, children are able to use strategy consciously in the process of map location, and also the validity and flexibility of children's strategy-selection increase with age. Young children's map ability improves with age. The age of 3.5-5.5 is an important transition period during this process.Second, the study on the map use and educational thinking in the preschool education. Through field observation and interviews with teachers to learn about how's the status and development for the map related activities, as well as the teacher themselves' educational attitude and ethic on young children's map activity, through the analysis of teaching materials, learn the points of the map related content in our country's preschool teaching materials.The results show that during the educational practice of kindergarten, teachers believe that pre-school children have certain map ability, it's valuable in a wide range for the children to be exposed to and learn how to use map. However, in the preschool education there's little support to the children's map ability, the map and its analogues using are more emphasized as the tool value. Teachers know much about the map tooling value, but less on the value of humanistic value. The materials also reflect the same values, more emphasis on the promotion of cognitive aspect, but less and weak on emotion and worldview cultivation.According to the findings, suggestions on the development of young children's map ability have been advanced at the end of the thesis.