Differences in Thematic Map Reading by Students and Their Geography Teacher

A school world atlas is likely the first systematic cartographic product which students encounter in their lives. However, only a few empirical studies have analysed school atlases in the context of map reading and learning geographical curricula. The present paper describes an eye-tracking study conducted on 30 grammar school students and their geography teacher. The study explored ten tasks using thematic world maps contained in the Czech school world atlas. Three research questions were posed: (i) Are students able to learn using these particular types of maps? (ii) Have the cartographic visualization methods in the school atlas been adequately selected? (iii) Does the teacher read the maps in the same manner as students? The results proved that the students were sufficiently able to learn using thematic maps. The average correctness of their answers exceeded 70%. However, the results highlighted several types of cartographic visualization methods which students found difficult to read. Most of the difficulties arose from map symbols being poorly legible. The most problematic task was estimating the value of the phenomenon from the symbol size legend. Finally, the difference between the students’ and teacher’s manner of reading maps in each task was analysed qualitatively and then quantitatively by applying two different scanpath comparison methods. The study revealed that the geography teacher applied a different method than her students. She avoided looking at the map legend and solved the task using her knowledge.

Interactions between the Design Factors of Airplane Artificial Horizon Displays

We investigated three interaction effects between the design factors of artificial horizon displays in the context of an airplane upset recovery task. To explain some inconsistent results from previous research about the superiority of moving-airplane designs, we hypothesized and explored interactions between moving element, roll scale/index, display size, and symbol size. A 24 factorial experiment was conducted with 20 novice subjects on a desktop simulator. Moving element was found to interact with display size and symbol size in an unexpected fashion, although the size of the effects was small. Spatially compatible roll scale/index was strongly supported, while the evidence for moving-airplane was weaker than expected. We explained that when redundant roll angle information is present, subjects tend to focus on the indication that appears most usable to them. Roll scale/index appeared to be more compelling than airplane symbol and horizon for roll indication purposes.