Synthesized Model of Geospatial Thinking

Since the National Research Council (2006) report Learning to Think Spatially formalized geospatial thinking, researchers and educators have recognized the importance of investigating and understanding geospatial thinking. Conceptual frameworks have been developed and applied to individual research projects. Although useful in these contexts and potentially extendable to other related inquiries, they also overlap and conflict with one another. Moreover, the separate frameworks are built on different constructs, resulting in a disparate rather than a cohesive theoretical foundation for geospatial thinking. This article synthesizes existing frameworks and generates a model that represents conceptual advances and provides a foundation for research question generation.