How Well Do You Know Your Neighbor? College Knowledge: Canada vs The United States

As the world becomes more globalized, the role of geographic knowledge in everyday affairs grows. Notwithstanding this idea, previous research surveys indicate that young adults are geographically illiterate but little research has been done in the past decade to investigate if this still holds true. In order to examine the current geographic literacy of young adults, American and Canadian college students were surveyed regarding geographic knowledge of their neighboring country. To do this, I made a trip to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia to survey Canadian students in person. I also did in person surveys at Arizona State University to collect American students' knowledge. Both surveys were done with pen and paper and questions were either identical or similar in what geographic knowledge the question was testing the survey taker on (i.e what is the capital of Canada for American students and what is the Capital of the United States for Canadian students). Results indicated that despite being from different countries, both participant pools showed similar knowledge about their neighboring country with almost identical scores; American college students answered an average of 50% of the questions correct and Canadian students slightly above that at 51% of questions correct. Although the scores were similar, underneath the overall survey results was a lot of variety in the students' responses, particularly regarding the subject and questions each student pool excelled in. In conclusion, however, it seems that both Canadian students and American students struggled more with political geography than they did with cultural geography but are overall illiterate in geographical knowledge with only being able to answer half of the questions correct.