THE INVESTIGATION OF LEVEL AND CONDITIONS OF SPATIAL THINKING DEVELOPING IN TERMS OF CARTOGRAPHY TEACHING
The article considers the experiment concerning students’ abilities of spatial thinking and the ways to facilitate development of spatial thinking skill in the study of cartography. On the basis of the experimental tasks the author comes to a conclusion that students have got lower intermediate and elementary levels of spatial thinking abilities. The testing process reveals shortcomings in spatial thinking abilities, among those are creating images and manipulating them while solving the classroom tasks. The knowledge of abilities in manipulating spatial images might help reinforce cartography learning. In order to overcome difficulties and gain skills in cartography students’ abilities might be facilitated by fulfilling a bunch of thoroughly selected exercises such as “Topographical dictation”, “Terrain plan making”, “Terrain orientation”, “Identifying object according its description”, “Geographic globe” etc.