Abstract
In this chapter, we review the research literature on children's geographical knowledge about countries. During the course of their development, children acquire a large body of knowledge about countries: they learn about the existence, location, size and shape of many different countries, they learn about the natural and man-made features (e. g. mountain ranges, rivers, coastlines, cities, etc.) which characterize some of these countries, and they learn about some of these countries' climates and their flora and fauna. This chapter reviews the research which has been conducted into children's acquisition of such knowledge. We begin by discussing children's knowledge of the geography of their own country.Children's knowledge of their own countryPiagetian researchPiaget (1928; Piaget and Weil, 1951) was the first researcher to conduct research in this field. His investigations, conducted with four to fifteen-year-old Swiss Genevan children, led him to propose that children's large-scale geographical knowledge exhibited three stages of development (following a pre-stage of ignorance before five years of age). The first stage lasted from five to seven–eight years of age: between these ages, Piaget and Weil found that children were able to name their own country, and were able to state when questioned verbally that the city in which they lived was located within this country. However, these children were unable to depict the correct spatial inclusion relationship between the city and the country in their drawings (typically drawing them side by side, rather than one within the other), and failed to understand the conceptual inclusion relationship that they themselves were simultaneously both Genevese and Swiss.