నైరూప్య

Geography Teachers��? Perspectives towards Geography Education with Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Assist. Prof. Dr. Murat ATEŞ

The purpose of this research is to put forth a total of 104 geography teachers’ perspectives towards the use and applications of GIS through a questionnaire throughout Turkey. In the study, general survey model was used and the questionnaire was used as data gathering tool. In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics along with t test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Chi-square tests were used. According to the findings of the research In terms of educational institutions’ physical facilities, nearly half of the institutions have computer labs and only a few of them (22%) have GIS software. A majority of the research teachers have heard about GIS before but only 32% of them are able to use and 25% of them use it in their geography courses. Among the research teachers’ students, only 19% of them use GIS or its applications in their projects or assignments. According to the findings, 27% of the research teachers participated in an educational activity towards GIS and 48% of them stated that they know where to take GIS education. A very significant point is that a majority of the geography teachers stated that they would participate in educational activities related to GIS organized by the National Educational Board. The participant geography teachers’ opinions towards GIS had no significant difference according to “gender”, “age”, or “vocational experience” variables.