Effectiveness of GIS as a tool in teaching basic geographic concepts to non-geography students

Geographical Information Systems has always being said as an effective teaching tool in enhancing students understanding of geography. Therefore a study was conducted to demonstrate that premise among Marine Science students in UKM. Two stages of test were conducted to 32 respondents to evaluate their level of basic geographic understanding at the beginning and the end of their GIS lectures and GIS activities. In general, the level of basic geographic understanding among respondents at the early stage is weak. Respondents failed to state-out important geographic terms such as spatial, place and time concepts. However, the finding at the second stage proved that GIS effectively improving the level of basic geographic understanding among respondents. All respondents can demonstrate important geographic key words and succesfully relating GIS technology with geographic concepts such as spatial data, spatial dimension, location, entity and attributes. This study proved the effectiveness of GIS as a suitable teaching tools of basic geographic concepts especially to those their understanding of basic geographic is weak.