Towards a holistic framework for delivering quality GIS education within and across disciplines

The current GIS education framework has gaps, undervalued elements, and decentralized components that make it difficult to effectively relate, teach, learn, and assess learning key constructs within and across disciplines. Building upon critical synthesis, analysis, and extension of multidisciplinary literature, we develop a student‐centered framework that places the 2D learning GIS space within the broader 3D educational space defined by cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning. The modalities of GIS learning are discussed in the contexts of the “circle of GIS thinking,” “triangle of GIS practice,” and “triangle of affective GIS.” The framework suggests that well‐rounded GIS individuals possess hard and soft (non‐)geospatial knowledge, skills, and abilities gained through learning by thinking, doing, and feeling. It is coherent, intuitive, extensible, and in sync with modern GIS perspectives and knowledge, and multimodal ways of mastering this subject. We demonstrate how the framework informs design and content considerations for hybrid minds‐on, hands‐on, and “body‐on” classroom assessments that mirror the nature of GIS. We conclude that the framework shows considerable potential to facilitate consistent and persistent delivery of quality GIS education.