The World in Their Minds: A Multi-scale Approach of Children’s Representations of Geographical Space - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 238

(b) Children had to answer a multiple choice question offering six possibilities
(children were asked to indicate all correct answers):

￿ The Sun revolves around the Earth
￿ The Earth revolves around the Sun
￿ The Moon revolves around the Earth
￿ The Earth revolves around the Moon
￿ The Moon revolves around the Sun
￿ The Sun revolves around the Moon

Because of the number of different conceptions (amongst others
Samarapungavan et al. 1996 ; Roald and Mikalsen 2001 ) the distinction heliocen-
tric/geocentric world view was central to the evaluation of test 3 ( see Table 19.3 ).

19.4 Results and Discussion

Despite great individual differences the results of this sample demonstrate that a
majority of the children, even among 11/12-year-olds, show incomplete mental
maps at all three scale levels (only 7% achieved a high overall score). The girls
scored slightly higher on test 1, the boys performed better on test 2 and 3.
Children's performances on the three tests are roughly comparable with previous
research in other countries on which the scoring tables were based ( see Sect. 19.3 ).
Because this paper focuses on overall performances at different spatial scales
individual and group differences are not further discussed here.

Table 19.3 Completing the Earth-Sun-Moon model and multiple choice question (test 3)
1 Geocentric view
2 Heliocentric view: no, unclear or false arrows—some questions false but clear heliocentric
view
3 Heliocentric view: no arrows/questions correct or correct arrows/some questions false
4 Heliocentric view: correct scheme and answers

Table 19.4 Correlations between test 2 and 3

Test 2 Test 3

.371 a Test 2 Spearman rho 1

Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 94 94

.371 a Test 3 Spearman rho 1

Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 94 94

a

Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)