Brain Science and Geographic Thinking: A Review and Research Agenda for K-3 Geography

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer comments on:

Brain Science and Geographic Thinking: A Research Agenda for K-3 Geography

The author(s) have done an impressive job of reading and comprehending a huge body of literature on the implications of brain science for teaching elementary geography students. The text follows a logical structure and then adds technical appendix.

This reviewer suggests a minor revision.

Consider modifying the title to read: Brain Science and Geographic Thinking: A Review and Research Agenda for K-3 Geography

Please expand the Abstract to include mention of all the components of the piece. The article begins with a short discussion of visual perception and analysis. There is a need to add reference to the material on math and LA, the primary school example and the technical appendix.

Consider moving the primary school example ahead of the section labeled Conclusion.

An important contribution in this manuscript are the suggested research questions in each of the sections related to spatial thinking. The Conclusion section should mention these suggestions that hopefully will get readers thinking and adding their own relevant research questions.

The emphasis is on visual analysis and the brain; can the author say anything about how applicable these ideas are for tactile analysis and the blind? And/or how tactile tracing of map patterns might reinforce learning?

The author(s) provide some very nice example of possible research questions, but several of these seem to come ‘out of the blue.’ Adding a sentence to help orient the reader to where the question is coming from would enable improved understanding.

I would think the NAS book, Learning to Think Spatially, might be mentioned and included in the reference list.

Perhaps some ideas to add to the conclusion: The text emphasizes grades K-3, it would be good to suggest whether or not the brain is capable for the specific types of spatial analysis at the pre-K level. And, it would be nice to share that a student of any age can benefit from relevant training in the types of analytic thinking presented.

The idea of map reading and analysis is emphasized in the text. Do the same ideas apply to air photo and satellite image analysis?

The author(s) should check the reference list and match it up with items in the text. This reviewer believes that a number of items need to added to the reference list.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

This reviewer had the most detailed comments, and I am grateful for them - I have tried to incorporate most of the suggestions in the revision.

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors of the manuscript for this work. I consider that they have done a great job that would have a greater impact if they added a methodological section explaining the procedure followed, for example, how they have searched for the 2200 references mentioned in the text. It is necessary to know how the search process was conducted, which databases were used, and how the documents were analyzed.

Author Response

I will try to add a sentence or two to clarify - but the simple fact is that the "search" was intentionally not mediated by any database, for a very good reason - people in different disciplines use words differently - especially "semi-jargon" terms like association, buffer, context, . . . region, sequence, top-down, . . . .  This makes a keyword-based search thru a database, in my opinion, very risky - one would often miss a key article like Turk-Browne 08, if one was unaware that his lab uses "statistical learning" to describe what a geographer calls "spatial association."

My "procedure" was a kind of Whewellian induction - using Google Scholar, sure, and reading books, and asking colleagues in different disciplines to recommend good articles and authors, but also just brute-force going through journals (more than 150 of them), reading abstracts, looking at graphics, following bibliographic citations in key articles, and occasionally just picking up "new" journals in the library to see if they had any articles that might be relevant,  - yes, even now I am occasionally (OK, weekly!) struck by finding something that I missed . . . but I am far more often dismayed to see scholars stuck in their disciplinary silo, unaware that others had addressed the issue that they claim to be "the first to . . . ."

So yes, that's messy, and often feels inefficient - but if someone has a couple hours to spare, I'd be glad to pick up one of the many "meta-analyses" in various journals and provide specific examples of how their database searches ended up missing key articles and often whole bodies of research

PS contact me directly, if so inclined - several professional groups are exploring ways to make an annotated copy of my working bibliography available for "data mining"   

(and suggestions for how to concisely explain my "procedure" would be welcome!)

Reviewer 3 Report

Citation of Muehrcke, 1978; 8th edition 2016 (line 13): not in references

Quote from Otálora and Taborda-Osorio 2020 (line 89): not in references.

Place the context of Figure 1: school level of students, location of the test, etc.

Avoid links to pages that cannot be viewed http://text-books.wmisd.org/GeographicBigIdeas.html. (line 221)

Figures or images: add the title and source

Author Response

thanks for catching the biblio glitches - 

I will try to reword the school reference, but I also have to weigh their implied preference for anonymity 

the text-books citation is an unfortunate happenstance of typesetting and layout - try it without the hyphen!  I will see what I can do to force a different line-break!