The Concept of Region in Geography Education

The aim of this study is to define the cognitive levels of undergraduate students, having geography education in the higher education institutions in our country, about the concept of region. In line with this aim, a survey comprising eight unstructured questions about the concept and characteristics of region was applied to 165 undergraduate students having education in the departments of Geography Teaching and Geography of the faculties of Education and Letters at six different universities in Turkey. Descriptive surveillance and content analysis methods were used in this research and to analyse the data obtained from the research, corresponding with the problems and sub-problems, frequency, arithmetic mean, percentage of values have been used; t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques were applied. The cognitive levels of undergraduate students differentiate with respect to the variables of department and university while not differentiating with respect to gender. The cognitive levels, regarding the concept and type of region, of undergraduate students receiving geography education have been found to be high for the questions 1 and 6, while being considerably low for the questions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.