Roger M. Downs is Professor of Geography and Head of the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University.  At various times, I have held positions at Johns Hopkins University, Colgate University, and the University of Washington.  During the 1995--1996 year, I was Geographer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society's Geography Education Program.

I was educated at the University of Bristol (England), with BA and PhD degrees in geography.  I have consulted for USA Today, Children's Television Workshop (and particularly Sesame Street), the National Assessment of Educational Progress, other federal agencies, and numerous educational publishers, the Council for Basic Education, state Departments of Education, the National Geographic Society, and local school districts.  I was the Writing Coordinator for the Geography Education Standards Projects, the group that produced Geography for Life: The National Geography Standards 1994.

I am intrigued by the development of knowledge about the world, about the interplay among the developing mind, environment, and education.  My research interests center on the relations among the understanding of space, ways of representing the world, and graphic communication systems.  These research interests are set into two principal contexts: a cognitive developmental context and an applied, instructional context.

Four principal factors have shaped my research interests in the intersections among geography, education, and cognitive studies.  First, I am interested in the nature of representation in general and in metaphors for representation in particular.  Second, I am interested in one class of representations, those involving graphics and hence concepts of visualization and space.  Third, my interests center on the domain of spatial cognition in general, and maps and notation systems in particular.  And finally I approach all of these interests from a Piagetian cognitive-developmental perspective, looking at the role of the interaction between cognitive operations and specific spatial-graphic skills in the understanding of graphic representations of space.

Currently, I am studying (1) the roots of geography (how and why some of us become geographers); (2) the development of expertise (how and why spatial/logical abilities interact with experience); (3) the differential development of expertise (how and why gender interacts with geography); (4) the development of graphic comprehension (how and why we learn to read the world through media).

Department of Geography
The Pennsylvania State University
302 Walker Building
University Park  PA 16802
Phone: 814-865-1915
Fax:  814-863-7943
E-mail: rd7@psu.edu

References:

Downs, R.. M.. (1997)  “The geographic eye: Seeing through GIS?” Transactions in GIS, 2, 111–122

Liben, L. S. and Downs, R. M. (1994) "Fostering Geographic Literacy from Early Childhood: The Contributions of Interdisciplinary Research." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15, 549-569.

Downs, R. M. (1994)  "Being and Becoming a Geographer: An Agenda for Geography Education."  Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84, 175-191.