Recent trend of geographic approaches to the development of children's environmental perception, cognition, and image

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the tendency of studies on children's environmental perception, cognition, and image proceeded from the interdesciplinary view point of psycology and humanistic geography in English speaking countries, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Most of the authors are engaged in geographical education at the primary school, and they are not always contended with the curriculum as well as teaching matearials of the geographical education in Japan. The outlines of processes and results of this study are as follows. 1. About 60 papers were refered from various fields of recent magazines, for example, geography, geographical education, environmetal-, educational-, developmetal-psycology, urban planning, and so on. Then 36 papers were selected and listed at the end of this paper. 2. The authors translated selected passages into Japanese from 5 papers among them and already published them in this magazine. Moreover, a comparative table of 10 papers is made, which consists of author's name, published years, research regions, subjects, ways of measure, extent area, perspectives, concepts, and main results. 3. The authors examined case studies concerning to children. At first, all case studies were divided into two groups, one is about children's cognitive maps or mental maps, and others. The former typical examples are Matthews' papers which insist development of children's cognitive maps mainly due to age. Among the latter there are papers making clear children's abilities of decipher aerial photographs. However, most studies tend to attach importance to children's ages as main factor of mental development. In particular, it is interesting and suggestive that Hazen et al. considers very young children (3-5 years old), and Hart studies on differences in children's field experience as factors of mental development. Those suggest geographers and teachers necessity of exploitation of curricullums or matearials for geographical education. 4. Through the process of surveying reference papers, the authors repeatedly discussed the relationships between the basic case studies about children and the practical side of the geographical education. They have agreed that accumulating of better teaching at the clasroom as well as researches leads to the development of more reasonable curriculum of geographical education.