I would like to raise three sets of issues regarding the connections between spatial cognition, children, and geographic education. I am attempting to be somewhat provocative in the interest of providing a basis for discussion.

The first set of issues, which has bothered me for some time now, deals with the difficulty of obtaining rigorous experimental control on experiments dealing with cognition in geographic space. Rigorous control is a cornerstone of experimental psychology, yet it is almost impossibe to find spaces and places at geographic scales that are identical except for what is being tested. Using maps or other small scale stimuli reveals things about cognition of maps, but not necessarily about geospatial cognition. It is difficult to eliminate the possibility that differences observed in geographic space may be due to variables that could not be controlled for.

A second set of issues regards performance of spatial tasks by young children. Poor levels of performance, compared with performance of adults, might reveal that children of that age have not yet developed particular spatial abilities. However, it might also result from the subjects' lack of understanding of the experimental instructions, or a lack of ability to perform a task out of context. The fact that very young children are able to use many prepositions correctly indicates that they can grasp a wide variety of often subtle distinctions in spatial relations. Yet, children may appear unable to perform relatively simple tasks until they are much older. I would be interested in discussion of research methods to overcome this apparent problem.

The third set of issues concerns the link between spatial cognition and geographic education. Do these fields have much in common?  Should they? As noted in my first point (above), even the connections between environmental or geographic cognition and spatial cognition for smaller objects is not clear. Geography school books that I have looked at seem to deal more with places and processes, and not much with spatial relations, shapes, orientations, and patterns. I am quick to admit that I have very little knowledge of school curricula for Geography, so I will be interested
to hear of ways in which concepts and principles that would be recognized by psychologists as part of spatial cognition show up in or underpin geographic education.