Mapping college students’ location knowledge of environmental events: Empirical evidence from Ethiopia and the USA

Abstract

This study analyses college students’ locational knowledge of environmental events, based on empirical evidence from Ethiopia and the USA – countries that occupy opposite margins on the socioeconomic, cultural and technological spectrum. Based on geo‐referenced data generated through a map‐embedded questionnaire survey from 200 students in higher learning institution, we employed multiple ring buffer analyses and standard distance functions of ArcGIS 10.3 and produced the spatial distance of target estimates on local and global scales. The finding disclosed a low level of accuracy in locating local and global environmental targets by the study participants in both countries. The USA students, however, modestly closed their inherent geographic knowledge gap, partly due to the unlimited access to geospatial tools and the concurrent expansion of map usage in their local media outlets. GIS helped not only to visualise and compare the accuracy of locational estimates by the study participants but also enabled to capture estimates that fall in the grey area between accurate and inaccurate precision levels in the environmental awareness studies.

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