Environmental Cognition of Young Children: Images of Journey to School and Home Area

This paper attempts to offer an insight into the personal geography of school children aged between six and eleven. A free-recall mapping technique is used to elicit images of familiar environments. The analysis is concerned with the impact age has upon the way in which children represent their journey to school and their home area. In addition, some alternative strategies are suggested for classifying and interpreting cognitive maps. It was found that with age children increasingly acquire more information about place, but the learning process cannot be described by a simple linear progression. It would appear that children learn about different environments in different ways and that even the youngest child is able to show some understanding of large-scale environments away from the home. Also, the way in which children represent space varies with age. Both mapping ability and map accuracy improved as children became older. These skills are not acquired in a straight forward manner as most children depicted space in the same way regardless of age. Whilst an age related progression was identified in terms of map sophistication, even the youngest children were able to represent environments in a variety of ways, sometimes employing relatively complex mapping styles. Until more studies are undertaken using different methodologies and appropriate techniques there may well be a danger of continually underestimating the young child's true environmental potential.