Engage Spatial Thinking in Geography Teaching Material

Abstract

The main competence of students in solving the problem of geography is that students are able to think of spatially. One important component supporting the achievement of the competence is the availability of teaching materials that engage spatial thinking. For this purpose, this study aims at including spatial thinking in geography teaching materials. This study used a procedure of systematic design of instruction by Dick and Carey (2001), each step is done in stages to produce a final product that is valid. In conclusion, in that procedure, spatial thinking can be included with either the geography teaching materials. However, this study is still limited to teaching materials of hydrology of geography teacher candidates in Indonesia, and focus on one component of spatial thinking, which is spatial concept. In the future, this research will be complemented by two other spatial thinking components, namely the representation of tools (media/ instructional technology), as well as the thinking process (input-process-output). The interesting issues are finding the most influential components to increase spatial thinking ability and determining its effectiveness if those three components are applied in a lesson. Key words: Spatial Thinking, Teaching Material, Geography. Background