Where Did You Say that State Was? The Effect of Availability on a Student's Knowledge of the United States.

Individuals' mental maps of the world are highly misrepresentative of the actual world. Availability in memory partly explains the reasons for this misrepresentation. When asked to place the 50 states in their correct locations, students have difficulty with states not in close proximity to their own because of availability, such that the proportion of students from the Midwest correctly recalled Illinois and the states connected to Illinois significantly more than the proportion of students from the West. In addition, the proportion of students from the West correctly recalled Idaho and the states connected to Idaho significantly more than the proportion of students from the Midwest, with the exception of Nevada, on which the students did not differ.  Students from across the world consistently have been found to have trouble sketching a world map with the countries included on it (Monastersky, 1992; Saarinen & MacCabe, 1995). Saarinen and colleagues (Bailly, MacCabe, & Saarinen, 1995; Kong, Savage, Saarinen, & MacCabe, 1994; Pinheiro, 1998; Saarinen, 1988; Saarinen & MacCabe, 1990; 1995; Walmsley, Saarinen, & MacCabe, 1990) have found that the students' mental maps have similar aspects. The students' maps are often either Eurocentric-centered or centered with their portion of the world in the middle of the map (Bailly et al., 1995; Saarinen, 1988; Saarinen & MacCabe, 1990; Walmsley et al., 1990). The mental maps include a higher percentage of countries that neighbor or are close to their own (Bailly et al., 1995; Kong et al., 1994; Pinheiro, 1998; Saarinen & MacCabe, 1990; Walmsley et al., 1990), include a higher percentage of countries that involve tourist relationships (Kong et al., 1994), include a higher percentage of countries that have received a lot of attention in the media recently (Kong et al., 1994; Pinheiro, 1998; Walmsley et al., 1990), include a higher percentage of countries that seem to stand out and represent an area (Pinheiro, 1998), and include a higher percentage of countries that have close ethnic, historical, political, or economic ties (Bailly et al., 1995; Kong et al., 1994; Saarinen & MacCabe, 1990; Walmsley et al., 1990). These research studies focused on the students' cognitive maps of the countries, which are not created as a means for wayfinding and orientation, like a guide or traveler would use, but serve as a means to "encode a range of cognitive and symbolic aspects of the environment" (Pinheiro, 1998, p. 322). The consistencies in the mental maps seem to point to a common theme. In fact, some instructors have indicated that having students draw a sketch map of the world in class is an excellent method to begin a discussion of the common errors found in the sketch maps, such as primacy, centrality, size, and knowledge or familiarity, and why these errors occur (Stetter and Ayotte, 2003). Moreover, Meyer (1997) described the classroom activity of sketch mapping as a means to illustrate a common psychological phenomenon entitled, the "availability heuristic" (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). The current study was conducted to examine the effect of the availability heuristic on American students' knowledge of a map of the United States. Given that students from throughout the world, and not only students from the United States, have difficulty correctly including countries on a world map, one wonders if the same findings would apply to a more specific area. In other words, one wonders if students' cognitive maps are also inaccurate for specific and regionally-close areas because they often learn more globalistic features, such as the continents, and not the micro-level details, such as the countries composing a continent. Kong et al. (1994) mentioned that the Singapore students in the study had extreme difficulty in naming African countries other than South Africa and Ethiopia, both of which received a large amount of media coverage when the data was collected due to apartheid and famine problems, respectively. …

Field of study: Education