If you’re reading this, you probably like maps, and quite likely can read them without much effort. So it might be easy to forget that map literacy isn’t necessarily a given, but it is important. Why Some Students Have Trouble with Maps and Spatial Representations is a tutorial for college-level geoscience instructors that looks at spatial abilities — by which, I think, they mean the capacity to extrapolate the real world from maps, models and the like. Reading a map, in other words. There’s a lot of research summarized and a lot of examples given, with implications for teaching the geosciences — which need spatial abilities the way that literature needs literacy — as well as more basic map reading (including topo maps). Via MapHist.