Understanding and responding to the challenges and opportunities of the world in the twenty-first century will require many skills; the capacities to think and communicate mathematically and scientifically will remain at a premium. Geographic literacy will also be necessary for reasons of enhancing economic competitiveness, preserving quality of life, sustaining the environment, and ensuring national security. As individuals and as members of society, humans face decisions on where to live, what to build where, how and where to travel, how to conserve energy, how to wisely manage scarce resources, and how to cooperate or compete with others.
Making all of these decisions, personal and collective, requires a geographically informed person—someone who sees meaning in the arrangement of things on Earth’s surface, who sees relations between people, places, and environments, who uses geographic skills, and who applies spatial and ecological perspectives to life situations. Geographic skills enable a person to understand the connections between patterns of rivers and the physical processes that create them, between patterns of cities and the human processes that create them, and between what happens in the places in which we live and what happens in places throughout the world, near and far.
The goal of the National Geography Standards is to enable students to become geographically informed through knowledge and mastery of three things: (1) factual knowledge; (2) mental maps and tools; (3) and ways of thinking.”
The National Geography Standards represent the consensus of the geography education community around what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from the 12th grade.
The first ever National Geography Standards, “Geography for Life”, were published in 1994 and revised in 2012. While every state has adopted geography curriculum standards based on “Geography for Life”, most students in the United States will not have had enough explicit geography instruction to meet all of these standards unless or until they enroll in an undergraduate program. Curriculum developers, K-12 teachers, and parents can help by increasing their own understanding of the value and power of a geographic education.
The 18 geographic knowledge standards are grouped by 6 Essential Elements:
How to use maps and other geographic representations, geospatial technologies, and spatial thinking to understand and communicate information
How to use mental maps to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context
How to analyze the spatial organization of people, places, and environments on Earth’s surface
The physical and human characteristics of places
That people create regions to interpret Earth’s complexity
How culture and experience influence people’s perceptions of places and regions
The physical processes that shape the patterns of Earth’s surface
The characteristics and spatial distribution of ecosystems and biomes on Earth’s surface
The characteristics, distribution, and migration of human populations on Earth’s surface
The characteristics, distribution, and complexity of Earth’s cultural mosaics
The patterns and networks of economic interdependence on Earth’s surface
The processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement
How the forces of cooperation and conflict among people influence the division and control of Earth’s surface
How human actions modify the physical environment
How physical systems affect human systems
The changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution, and importance of resources
How to apply geography to interpret the past
How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future.
CREATED BY
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION NATIONAL IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT
