Ian,+Ethan

**Hypothesis** We hypothesize that most high school students in the United States and South Korea have an insufficient understanding of basic world geography. Additionally, we propose that this lack of geographic proficiency occurs in about the same proportions across all high school age groups. Several indicators have already shown a lack of such knowledge in society: celebrities not knowing basic geography on television, the poor quality of education in many institutions of public education, and the deficiency of geography classes in Korean and American schools to name a few. In general, world geography has been greatly overlooked in both Korean and American academic courses, and where it has been integrated into educational curriculum, it often falls short of the level required in the development of a progressive citizen of the world.
 * How comprehensive is our understanding of the basic geography of the world? ** ** Can geographic regions be eliminated on maps and go unnoticed? **

**Objective** Our objective is to test high school students' proficiency in world geography; more specifically, a correlation will be drawn between age and proficiency. This is an important indicator not only of individual knowledge, but of the quality/prominence of geography in Korean and American educational systems as well.

**Method** A high school students will be shown a two-dimensional, geographic map of the world which contains twenty specific deletions of land masses; all seven continents will have anywhere from one to six omissions of existing land masses. The student will be asked to circle as many of these inaccuracies as they can find. (The map will be printed in color and enlarged to fit a regular size sheet of paper. It will be placed inside of a clear sheet protector, and students will be able to indicate the inaccuracies by circling the deleted regions with a dry-erase marker.) The test won't have a definitive time limit, but, ideally, the student should not exceed five minutes in completing the task. Once the student finishes the test, his or her age will be recorded along with the number of correctly identified land mass omissions. The process will then be repeated with several other high school students--as many as possible--, and the data will be analyzed and used to derive a relationship between high school students' ages and geographic proficiency. Lastly, the results of the test will be compared between Korean and American high school students.

**Potential Errors** ---A likely challenge will be forming a sample group that is accurately representative of the high school populations in South Korea and the United States. (The only thing that can be done to curb this error is to interview as many students as possible.) ---Subjects of the test must be trusted not to share their choices and results with other students. Possibly, if a subject is uncooperative in this area, the rest of the potential sample group may become tainted; this could bring into question whether an individual's geographic proficiency is actually being tested.

__Ethan's Literature Review__ //**1.**// Bednarz, Sarah Witham. “Citizenship in Post-9/‌11 United States: A Role for Geography Education?” //International Research in Geographical & Environmental Education// 12.1 (2003): 72-80. //Academic Search Premier//. Web. 28 Feb. 2012. This journal article illustrates that geographical understanding has become an essential value of the good American citizen, in great part due to events such as 9/‌11 which have significantly changed the national climate. Because our country’s crucial involvement in matters of foreign policy, it is now, more than ever, imperative that the American people have at least a basic grasp of geographical comprehension which will allow us to actively engage in international relationships. This article demonstrates the importance of the topic which we are choosing to analyze and base our experiment off of; geographic understanding is both relevant and current to sociology in everyday life. //**2.**// Murphy, Alexander B. “Geography’s Place in Higher Education in the United States.” //Journal of Geography in Higher Education in the United States// 31.1 (2007): 121-41. //Academic Search Premier//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Though this article is from 2007, it is useful in that it analyzes the historical development of geography in four-year colleges in the United States. According to the studies presented in the article, geography is on a rise in higher education, having reached its highest prominence in academic degrees within the fifteen years previous to the article’s published date. (I tried looking for a more recent study with the same topical information, but could not find any that provided up-to-date statistics on geography degrees in U.S. colleges.) From the perspective of this study, if we were to include college students in our sample group, it would likely boost the the “passing” rate for our covert map test. //**3.**// Thornton, Stephen J. “Geography in American History Courses.” //Phi Delta Kappan// 2007: 535-38. //Academic Search Premier//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. This article examines the role of geography in high school American history courses. According to the author, geography has been a topic that receives little attention across the board in American educational institutions, particularly in high schools. The author also presents his case that geography should be more integrated into history classes so that it will enhance the learning process in the social sciences. At this point, I am under the impression that the majority of our sample group will be high school students, and if what this author suggests holds true, not many teenagers will be able to identify the omission we include in our map during the “mock” interview. //**4.**// Ünlü, Mehmet. “The Level of Realizing Geographical Skills in Geography Lessons.” //Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice// 11.4 (2011): 2166-72. //Academic Search Premier//. Web. 28 Feb. 2012. This article defines geography as “a relationship between human and location.” It also classifies the major goals/benchmarks for geographical skills development in geography lessons and presents a case study that matches these standards against a school of ninth through twelfth students. According to the results of the case study, ninth graders have a lower success rate in meeting geographical skills benchmarks while twelfth graders show significant improvement. The definition of geography presented in this article might suggest that lack of awareness of a people and/‌or the geographical region that they inhabit would contribute to not noticing the omission of a particular country on a map; we should keep this in mind when choosing which country, or countries, to eliminate. Also, we should definitely seek to have a balance of high school class levels in order to have the best representation of our respective student bodies.

__Ian's Literature Review__ //**1.**// http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/ed/2007/winter/features/geography.html The national geography conducted a research about how an average american knew about the general geography of the world. As the title of the article, "Don't Know Much About Geography", suggests, the average American didn't know a lot about the general geography of America. A more shocking allusions was made to this research. Harvard University conducted another research to know more about the school curriculum that was teaching geography. It turned out that the school didn't have a holistic and comprehensive curriculum that taught the students well about geography. Sometimes, their curriculums didn't include most of the important geographic features and only taught an American centralized system of geography. The article also blames tests. The research points out how America became a test-centralized nation after standardized tests like the SAT and APs became part of the curriculum of the high school. This is an alarming sign in society and it points to the fact that an average american doesn't know much about geography.


 * Ethan’s Raw Research Data (From a Total of 62 Test Subjects) **
 * Number of Correct Land Mass Deletion Identifications (Max possible: 20) ||  Age (rounded to the nearest year)  ||
 * 5 || 18 ||
 * 5 || 17 ||
 * 1 || 18 ||
 * 1 || 18 ||
 * 1 || 18 ||
 * 2 || 18 ||
 * 4 || 17 ||
 * 2 || 18 ||
 * 2 || 17 ||
 * 1 || 17 ||
 * 12 || 17 ||
 * 6 || 16 ||
 * 3 || 17 ||
 * 4 || 17 ||
 * 1 || 16 ||
 * 2 || 17 ||
 * 4 || 18 ||
 * 5 || 15 ||
 * 3 || 18 ||
 * 5 || 15 ||
 * 2 || 15 ||
 * 2 || 15 ||
 * 7 || 17 ||
 * 0 || 17 ||
 * 6 || 17 ||
 * 1 || 16 ||
 * 3 || 15 ||
 * 10 || 15 ||
 * 7 || 16 ||
 * 3 || 16 ||
 * 10 || 16 ||
 * 5 || 16 ||
 * 2 || 17 ||
 * 2 || 16 ||
 * 2 || 14 ||
 * 5 || 14 ||
 * 4 || 14 ||
 * 9 || 16 ||
 * 5 || 18 ||
 * 0 || 17 ||
 * 3 || 18 ||
 * 7 || 17 ||
 * 4 || 18 ||
 * 2 || 17 ||
 * 1 || 18 ||
 * 3 || 18 ||
 * 2 || 17 ||
 * 4 || 18 ||
 * 2 || 18 ||
 * 5 || 18 ||
 * 4 || 18 ||
 * 6 || 18 ||
 * 4 || 18 ||
 * 5 || 16 ||
 * 8 || 17 ||
 * 2 || 16 ||
 * 3 || 15 ||
 * 5 || 16 ||
 * 12 || 16 ||
 * 3 || 17 ||
 * 5 || 16 ||