Supporting Students’ Perspective-Taking Through an Operationalised Competency Model: Insights from an Intervention in Geography Education

The ability to take another person’s perspective is a valuable skill in today’s society, fostering a better understanding of complex issues involving differing viewpoints. Although this competency is also central in geography education, there has been little analysis of students’ perspective-taking, and no method has been proposed to teach it effectively in geography classes. Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyse and systematically foster students’ competency in perspective-taking using a developed competency model. The study was situated within a pre- and post-test control group design (14 secondary students in the experimental group; 15 in the control group). Quantitative pre- and post-test data showed minimal changes in students’ perspective-taking competency, which underlines the complexity of the competency and supports the article´s focus on the intervention itself to gain deeper insights into how competent secondary students are in this regard, as well as how they engaged with and reflected on the guided perspective-taking tasks. Overall, the intervention results showed that the students demonstrated a high level of perspective-taking competency when guided by respective tasks. Furthermore, the students self-reported that they were able to cope with the given tasks. The operationalised model could therefore help students to understand perspective-taking and can support them to develop perspective-taking competency.