Harold McWilliams and Paul Rooney

Mapping Our City

A Progress Report on GIS as a Tool in Urban Education

Abstract

How can GIS resources and technology have their greatest impact in urban educational settings? How can urban students use GIS to understand their community, be involved in improving it, and have an influence on the decisions that affect their community's future? How can GIS be implemented in actual school systems? Mapping Our City is a two-year project funded by the National Science Foundation that is attempting to answer these questions. The project is developing an introductory unit: Mapping Our Neighborhood - A Guide to Getting Started with GIS, model curriculum units that use GIS as a tool in science investigations, and a guide for educators: A Resource Guide for GIS in Urban Education. The project is being carried out by TERC, a non-profit R & D corporation in Cambridge, MA. Although the project is located in Boston, its results are intended for national and international application. The research and development goals being pursued in Mapping Our City grow out of the recommendations of the First National Conference on the Educational Application of Geographic Information Systems (EdGIS) held in Washington, D.C., in January, 1994. We will share the results of our work during the first year of the project and discuss our development plans for the second year of work.

Can middle school students use powerful Geographic Information System technologies to better understand and help improve their communities while at the same time developing math, science, and technology knowledge and skills? While a growing number of projects around the United States suggest that the answer is "yes," TERC's Mapping Our City project aims to demonstrate that this is the case. Endnote 1

Project Overview

Mapping Our City is a two-year project in which middle school teachers and students in Boston explore the uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in project-based science, environmental education, and geography. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and developed by TERC, a nonprofit education research and development company based in Cambridge. (Endnote 2)

The purpose of the project is to explore how computer-based GIS systems, originally developed for use in industry and government, can enhance middle school science education, particularly in urban school systems. For example, students can study the relationships between the distribution of urban vegetation, soil types, animal life, air and water characteristics, the built environment, and the human population. From among all the potentially interesting scientific investigations that could be undertaken, the project is identifying and developing those that are the most engaging and promising for urban middle school education and that will most powerfully enhance student learning and motivation.

Project Goals

identify appropriate software, data, and curriculum to support middle school science investigations in urban settings
develop a curriculum unit that introduces GIS concepts and skills to urban middle school students
develop sample curriculum units that use GIS to enhance middle school science investigations in urban settings
field test these units in urban school classrooms in Boston and neighboring cities
disseminate these units along with a resource guide for GIS in urban education

The Urban Setting

Mapping Our City has an urban focus. Urban education is one of the most troubled sectors of American education. Urban school systems have, in general, a lower level of student attendance, motivation, graduation, and academic attainment than their suburban and rural counterparts. Too often, students see no practical application for the knowledge and skills they are asked to acquire in school. One of the approaches that urban educators have devised to counteract these low levels of student motivation is to link classroom activities to community involvement. The Mapping Our City project is taking a similar approach in linking formal education with community involvement. By getting students involved with community organizations which need their GIS-related skills and resources we are helping students realize that they can make a difference in their communities through their academic work.

Partnerships

The project is forging partnerships with a number of local and national organizations, including the Boston Public Schools, the Boston Edison company, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, Esri, Wessex, and IDRISI. These organizations are lending their support to the project through the donation of GIS software, data, and experience.

Working with Teachers

Teachers play a crucial role in the success of the project. We have recruited a small interdisciplinary team of teachers in each of three middle schools to participate in the project. Teachers play an active, collaborative role in the project's curriculum development by providing ideas and feedback and serving as field test sites. Each team receives full support in terms of software, curriculum materials, computing resources, professional development credits, and released days for extra work when appropriate. Some teachers will be involved in more intensive work with the project during the summer.

In working with the teachers as co-developers, we have tried to take our lead from the projects they are already doing with their students. In one school, for example, the team of 7th grade teachers had developed an interdisciplinary unit called "The 'Hoods," in which students studied the history, development, and characteristics of several Boston neighborhoods from which the students in this school were drawn. (Endnote 3) We are working with the teachers to see how the curriculum they have developed can be enriched by the availability of GIS technology.

At a second school one of the teachers has been involved with his 7th grade students in testing the water of a river that flows near the school. The students are very interested in the problems (such as high levels of coliform bacteria) that their urban river experiences. However, they have not studied any sites on the river except the one immediately adjacent to their school. We will be working with them to add other monitoring sites along the river in order to increase their understanding of its problems by adding a geographic component to their work.

Advisory Board

To provide a broader perspective on our work, we have recruited an advisory board composed of teachers, educational researchers and developers, software developers, GIS professionals, and others involved with GIS. The board meets twice a year to review our work and provide input and advice. During the time between meetings, the board communicates through e-mail and an educational GIS listserv. (Endnote 4)

TERC's Involvement in GIS

GIS technology is powerful and new to education. Historically, TERC has been on the cutting edge of bringing new technologies to educational settings, such as the use of microcomputer-based laboratories and the use of telecommunications in the classroom. A few years ago several people at TERC became interested in the potential of GIS technologies in education. In the spring of 1994, in conjunction with the National Geographic Society and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, TERC coordinated the First National Conference on the Educational Application Of Geographic Information Systems (EdGIS),held in Washington, D.C. The Mapping Our City project, as well as a number of other GIS-related projects grew out of the recommendations of that conference and continues TERC's tradition of bringing to the classroom powerful technologies that were first developed for use in the business and scientific world.

Experience So Far: The Summer 1995 Pilot Study

During the summer of 1995 we conducted a pilot study in which we tried out some of the components that we anticipate will be used in the "Mapping Our Neighborhood" introductory curriculum unit. During a six-week period we worked with fifteen high school students at a community computer center near Boston. All students were from disadvantaged, urban environments. The work focused on helping students improve their understanding of their local community through a variety of mapping activities.

Activities that we developed and tested included

creating maps of their community from mental imagery
using paper maps and aerial photos of various kinds to understand their community
working with a computer program (SimCity) to simulate community growth and dynamics
using GIS systems to assist in the location of a teenage recreation center that the students designed

Preliminary findings from the Pilot Study

One of the most important findings that emerged from the summer 1995 pilot was the realization that there is an important synergy among paper maps, electronic maps (e.g. in ArcView), computer simulations (such as SimCity), and real-world problem-solving. Understanding this synergy may turn out to be crucial to the successful use of GIS in educational settings. Each medium through which information was presented - paper street maps, computer simulations, aerial photos, and GIS-generated electronic maps - had its own value and relationship to the others.

We found, for example, that the students were easily engaged in using the paper maps to locate familiar elements of their environment, such as their own homes, the homes of their friends, their school, recreation areas, and favorite shopping locations. They also found it interesting to locate the streets they traveled and the public transportation routes they used. In contrast, they were relatively less interested in historical maps of their community that showed change over time. This suggests further research on how to engage students in the process of historical change through maps.

In our use of the ArcView GIS package, we focused on its use as a tool to support student explorations and investigations of their local community. We found that the coordinated use of paper maps and aerial photos was especially important to provide the context for understanding the computer maps. We also found it valuable to have a specific challenge (deciding where to locate a teen center) to give purpose to their use of the software.

The students were interested in using the computer simulation, SimCity, to create their own simulated urban environment. Our experience suggests that SimCity is a remarkably useful and powerful GIS-like tool, which engages the students, and provides spatial visualizations that support their work with other tools such as ArcView. They quickly learned what elements of infrastructure (e.g., roads, power plants, electric distribution grids) had to be in place as preconditions for habitation and growth. They also were quick to pick up the idea that a city consists of and requires differentiated kinds of activities -- industrial, commercial, residential. As a result of their work with SimCity, they returned with new interest to questions of urban zoning, transportation, and infrastructure.

Research issues that emerged from the Pilot Study

We found that the students' ability to engage with and make sense of spatial information depended, in part, on the way the information was presented visually. From these experiences we generated hypotheses that we will test in our continuing work. As an example, it seemed that aerial photos were more engaging and easier to understand, at least initially, when they employed an oblique rather than a perpendicular view of the ground. The aerial orthophotos (which employ a perpendicular view) were particularly difficult for students to "read."

The students found paper street maps useful for locating particular elements of their urban environment, such as their home and school, and for tracing connections between elements, such as the bus route from home to a recreation area. Electronic maps produced from the GIS were most useful for decision-making, such as deciding where to place a teen center based on the number of teenagers living in different census tracts within the city. The SimCity computer simulation was most useful for generating interest in and understanding of the different kinds of activity zones found within a city (industrial, commercial, residential, governmental) and for raising questions that could be addressed with the other tools. We hypothesize that the simulation allowed students to become engaged with the dynamics of an urban system in a way that the other tools simply did not.

Current Work

Our current work consists of surveying the available GIS tools (software, data, and curriculum), developing ArcView projects and curriculum, and field-testing them in actual classrooms. This work is described in the remainder of the paper.

GIS Tools for Education: Software, Data, and Curriculum

Part of our work is to identify the software packages, data sources, and GIS-related curricular resources that are most valuable and appropriate for use in middle and high school educational settings. Making these determinations is difficult, in part, because the field of GIS continues to evolve rapidly, both in terms of software platforms and data availability.

Historically, GIS software and data sources were developed as specialist tools for use in government and industry. In such an environment, the software providers could assume sophisticated users willing to invest considerable time and money in learning how to use the software and access data. These conditions, of course, will not hold in school settings. Therefore, in planning for educational use of GIS we must assume that, at least initially, neither teachers nor students will have a high degree of facility with GIS software and data. We must also assume that the commitment of resources to acquiring this facility, both financial and human, will be limited. These factors suggest that significant simplification of the software interface and of access to GIS data must be made for education.

We have identified a number of organizations that have made substantial progress in adapting and simplifying GIS tools for use by less sophisticated users, such as students and teachers. We are in the process of establishing collaborative relationships with them that will allow us to benefit from their experience and expertise.

The Importance of Curriculum

A key component of the project is to develop exemplary inquiry-based curriculum for urban education that takes advantage of the analytical power of GIS. In our review of existing resources we have not found these kinds of curriculum resources to be available. We believe that exemplary curriculum is the key to the success of GIS in schools. Teachers and school systems will not widely adopt GIS unless it is tied to curriculum that fits with emerging standards.

We further believe that the curriculum that is most needed is not curriculum that teaches about GIS, but curriculum that uses GIS tools to significantly enhance what students can learn in traditional disciplines. Our focus in this project, therefore, is on developing curriculum that uses GIS tools in authentic science investigations. We plan to develop two science curriculum units and one unit that introduces GIS concepts and skills through mapping the neighborhood around the school. As mentioned above, we will develop these units in close collaboration with the middle school teachers with whom we are working.

Each curriculum unit will be prepared as a set of lesson plans, student activity sheets, an ArcView project, and supplementary materials such as paper maps and primary reference sources. The ArcView project will include a set of digital maps, data tables, prepared themes, digital images, and text files related to the content of the unit. Students will work with this GIS information in the context of the curriculum activities.

One area that distinguishes Mapping Our City from other K-12 efforts in GIS is our commitment to student-generated data. We feel it is important that students not only work with provided data, but that they contribute their own data to the GIS data set.

Incorporating local data grounds the activities in a context familiar to the student and generates "ownership" of the data set. Allowing the student to generate questions, design a field survey instrument, conduct field observations, enter that data, conduct analyses and then defend his/her actions and decisions incorporates their work into a larger process of critical thinking that uses GIS as a tool.

Water Quality: A Curriculum Example

One of the science units we plan to develop is a water quality monitoring unit. This unit will involve students in studying the history, development, present condition, and future prospects of the Muddy River, a tributary of the Charles River, that flows through the Fenway area of Boston. As the Muddy River is only approximately two miles long, it is feasible for students to become familiar with the entire length of the river. The Muddy River is plagued with the pollution problems typical of urban rivers: various forms of non-point pollution and many old and illegal sewage discharges.

Several of the teachers with whom we are working already involve their students in monitoring the water of the Muddy River, but none of them incorporates GIS or any geographic component into their work. We plan to work with several citizen organizations, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US EPA, local universities, and state and local agencies to develop a curriculum unit that guides students to understand the history of the river, including human modifications of its channel and flow, the human impact of urban development on the river, the degradation of the river to an unsanitary condition, the causes of this degradation, and the range of strategies that can help restore the river to a more natural condition. Over time we will involve a number of schools in the monitoring process.

Muddy River Area Land Use Data

Starting from a GIS base map, aerial orthophotos, and land use data, students will gather data on the river and its watershed to construct a composite picture of its current condition. Using on-screen digitizing they will construct data layers representing the river's course at different historical times. These layers will show the history of human modification of the stream. Teams of students from cooperating schools will measure various aspects of the river's condition at strategic points along its length. They will monitor such water characteristics as: temperature, pH, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen, stream flow, and biological oxygen demand. Specific teams will be encouraged to "adopt" sections of the river to monitor. Students will enter their data into the GIS system, geo-reference the data, and analyze it using the capabilities of the GIS.

This curriculum unit and the others we develop will be field-tested with several different classrooms in Boston and will be revised based on that experience.

Dissemination of Project Results

At the conclusion of the project in 1997, the three curriculum units (one introductory and two in science) will be distributed to educators nationwide in printed form on a cost-recovery basis and electronically on the World Wide Web. In addition, we will prepare a Resource Guide for GIS in Urban Education, that will help other urban school districts begin to use GIS. It will include the introductory and science curriculum units (generalized for use in cities other than Boston), software guidelines, suggestions for data sources, and recommendations for other curriculum extensions using GIS.

Development of a GIS Application for Education

The Mapping Our City project entered an initial development phase with several purposes and expectations that helped shape our early work. These purposes and expectations were fueled by discussions over the strengths and weaknesses of existing GIS software with respect to K-12 users, and by the discussions of the education content desired in the inquiry-based activities.

In detail, the Mapping Our City GIS application will:

be one or more ArcView projects, employing a modified user interface constructed using Avenue
consist of resources and standard and customized ArcView tools
have five main purposes:
1. It will provide students and teachers a data-rich environment in which to explore Boston through a multimedia ArcView application;
2. It will provide opportunities for students to ask and answer questions about the Boston metropolitan area;
3. It will be expandable by the students and will provide them an opportunity to incorporate information that they collect as part of the Mapping Our Neighborhood activities;
4. It will bring together a preselected set of local data to serve as a base level of local information, to which they can add data they create, and
5. It will encourage the development of critical thinking skills in students through their design of research questions, databases, field survey procedures and analysis strategies that will best answer those questions.

We have certain performance criteria for the application, based again on desired ease of student and teacher use:

In general, the application should work quickly.
Data access should be streamlined.
Zooming in and out on maps should occur easily and quickly.
Student data input should be easy.
Common operations should be activated by Avenue-programmed scripts.

There are a wealth of resources aiding the project investigations, including maps, images, aerial photographs, digital orthophotographs, tabular census information, movie clips, scanned drawings and photographs, and textual information.

The project has greatly benefited from an Advisory Board consisting of teachers, educational software developers, GIS professionals, and individuals carrying out research in GIS and K-12 education. The initial convening of this group was an opportunity for the review of the Mapping Our City application prototype. Our hope was to receive feedback from the board on its perceived utility in serving the project further. What worked, and didn't? What of value was worth saving? What new directions or dimensions must the application feature in its next version? To get to that stage of the discussion it is necessary to understand the conditions present at the beginning of the project, what our assumptions were as to how best to proceed, and what stumbling blocks we have encountered during the young life of this application. An overview of these conditions, assumptions and stumbling blocks is offered below.

Choice of the ArcView Platform

ArcView's availability in both Macintosh and PC platforms was one of the deciding factors in our choosing it for the Mapping Our City project (along with Esri's demonstrated commitment to K-12 education and the wealth of local, regional, and global data available in ArcInfo format.)

ArcView's Avenue programming language will permit customization of the ArcView interface, the streamlining of ArcView processes, and the inclusion of other software packages (i.e. access to spreadsheets or database management software that might allow for multiple-student participation in the data creation process.)

In the future, as our experience grows and as we become better acquainted with classroom needs, we will revisit the question of GIS software and, perhaps, include other programs in our development process.