Abstract:
Purposes: The purpose of this research was to study general problems of the teaching and the learning of geography at the upper secondary level in Bangkok in order to improve the teaching and the learning of geography. Precedures: The data for this research have been collected through three different questionnaire types : rating scale, multiple choice and open end. The questionnaires were sent to twenty administrators, forty-six teachers and four hundred students in nine upper secondary government scholls, nine upper secondary private schools and two upper secondary demonstration schools. The total was twenty schools. The returned questionnaires were first analyzed by means of arithmetic mean, standard deviation and percentage, and then tabulated and explained descriptively. Conclusions: First, most of the school administrators were moderately favorable towards the problems of Geography teachers. Problems concerning teachers knowledge and understanding of the curriculum content and teaching methodology were few. The main problem of teaching geography was the shortage of money for social studies rooms. Second, most Geography teachers realized the importance of this subject and highly understood geography concepts and enjoyed teaching geography. Their teaching problems were an unfavorable attitude of their students toward the particular subject. The ratio of curriculum content was not equal to the number of marks. The teachers and the students also suggested that geography texts should be improved in regards to increasing the amount of pictures and maps. Content and statistics should be up-dated. However, some of the critical problems found were the lack of teaching materials and the work overload of the teachers. Because of a too great amount of content in the curriculum, learning activities were limited. The last finding was the problem of evaluation. There were no analyses of the tests. Moreover, the teachers still faced the problem of the shortage of materials in constructing tests and had no time to evaluate their students. The teachers needed refresher courses in their subject matter, improved methods of teaching, methods of constructing and using teaching materials and new techniques of evaluation. The students needed a variety of teaching and learning activities.