MAP INTERPRETING SKILLS – A CLASSROOM EXPERIMENT WITH AND WITHOUT ICT AMONG LOWER SECONDARY SCHOOL PUPILS IN NORWAY

This study focuses on 8th- 9th grade pupils' skills in interpreting biological map information. The teaching was done as a project-based cross-subject work, aiming to test map interpreting skills through pre- and post tests. Data was collected from 100 pupils coming from one lower secondary school in a rural area in Mid-Norway. The pupils were divided into two test groups, a “GPS-group/digital map group” and a “Compass/paper map group”. Teaching was carried out in the framework of sociocultural theory, pupils worked in pair-groups, and the learning was seen as a social authentic inquiry based activity. The results indicate that the pupils increased their map interpreting skills, but no difference was found between the two groups using different tools. The conclusion from this study is that the tools, digital or not, did not influence the subject learning if taking into account the importance of making interesting, challenging, authentic, and inquiry based tasks based on sociocultural thinking. The study will be followed up by analysis of a follow-up test 5 months after ending the project, by deeper analysis of the presented tasks; and of analysis of other tasks involving the understanding of map scale and the map coordinate system.