Abstract
Geospatial Semester: Developing Students' 21st Century Thinking Skills with GIS
Track: User Presentations - Teaching
Authors: Mike Charles, Bob Kolvoord
Do high school seniors who complete a final community-based GIS project demonstrate evidence of recognized 21st Century thinking skills when independently rated by GIS capable faculty? The GIS project was completed as part of the Geospatial Semester in Virginia, a semester- or year-long course taught by high school faculty with support from higher education faculty in which students used geospatial tools on a daily basis. 21st Century Skills were defined using two prominent frameworks and then applied to create a topic-specific analytic rubric with four levels of performance for each of six skills. The rubric was used by three raters to evaluate 138 final projects in three different academic years. Analysis of the findings indicates strong evidence of 21st Century thinking skills with reasonable levels of inter-rater reliability. Further work will be suggested together with a discussion of the sustainability of this curriculum innovation using GIS technologies for learning.