Europe and the United States: the implementation of geographic information systems in secondary education in two contexts

Since its inception in the early 1990s, geographic information science and its related technology, geographic information systems (GIS), have diffused slowly into select groups of K‐12 classrooms worldwide. The technology has not been adopted at a rate commensurate with expectations. The purpose of this article is to explore GIS implementation by comparing the variable status of GIS education in pre‐collegiate education in the United States and Europe and factors that appear to play a role in diffusion. The authors use a model of internal and external factors that influence adoption of education innovation as a heuristic to compare and draw conclusions.