Web GIS as a pedagogical tool in tourist geography course: the effect on spatial thinking ability and self-efficacy

ABSTRACT While Web GIS has been supposed as a useful tool in improving the spatial thinking abilities of students, most existing empirical studies were seldom undertaken in an educational programme providing rather limited geo-technological training to students. This study focuses on tutorial sessions of a tourism geography course in a Singaporean university, in which students usually engaged with very few GIS and other geospatial technologies. Combining a standardised assessment, that is Spatial Thinking Abilities Test, and semi-structured interviews, the study suggests that the implementation of Web GIS, collaborating with students’ major background and pre-existing GIS experience, efficiently enhanced their performance in spatial thinking abilities test; moreover, the exposure to GIS practices during tutorial sessions also stimulated students’ interest in using GIS and enhanced self-efficacy, which further equipped students with stronger motivation to continue learning geography. The paper contributes to existing debates around (Web) GIS as a pedagogical tool through incorporating qualitative interview materials into the discussion.


Introduction
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is an integrated set of data-driven programmes which enable users to easily collect, analyse, archive and retrieve spatial information derived from the real world (Fitzpatrick & Maguire, 2001).While taking geography as its home discipline, GIS shares great similarities with computational sciences, as it relies on a range of computational hardware and software to collect, store and process huge volumes of digital geospatial data (Nyerges, 2009).The computational feature of GIS differentiates it from other sub-disciplines of geography in which digital data and computational settings may not be necessary.Notably, the differences between GIS and other sub-disciplines of geography do not refer to a definite boundary; GIS as a critical analytical tool and a thinking way has been employed in studies on a wide range of geographical topics like gentrification (Zambrano et al., 2021), feminist space (Kwan, 2002) and ageing population (Ho et al., 2021).
As an important component of the discipline of geography and a crucial analytical tool of geographical research, GIS has two implications in geography education: teaching about GIS and teaching with GIS (Sui, 1995).To put it simply, teaching about GIS aims to provide students with the knowledge and technology of GIS per se (such as the digitalisation, visualisation, management and analysis of geospatial data) as well as relevant training (Harvey & Kotting, 2011;Lukinbeal & Monk, 2015); teaching with GIS means that GIS acts as a toolkit to help students acquire knowledge of various disciplines (A.González et al., 2021;Yin, 2010), that is the primary entry point of this article.Teaching with GIS has undergone wide interrogations in the contexts of both universities and schools in the last two decades.Existing literature has emphasised that GIS could act as an efficient pedagogical tool to help students acquire specific knowledge of human geography, migration studies, public health and other subjects regarding geospatial processes (Baker et al., 2015).In addition to disciplinary knowledge, recent scholarship has noted the effect of GIS on students' spatial thinking capacities, self-efficacy and general achievement in their learning performance (e.g.Bearman et al., 2016;Fargher, 2018).
Despite existing inspired discussion regarding GIS as a pedagogical tool, how GIS could contribute to higher geography education needs further exploration.As stated previously, scholars have respectively examined the effect of GIS on either learning disciplinary knowledge or developing thinking abilities.However, there is a lack of the conversations between the two branches of research.Little research has commented on whether and how the improvement of students' spatial thinking abilities, thanks to the adoption of GIS in teaching, could contribute to their general interest in learning geography (Hou et al., 2016).The possibility should be further examined by empirical evidence.Taking a tutorial session of a tourism geography course as the research case, the paper interrogates the role of Web GIS as a pedagogical tool in higher geography education.The choice of Web GIS was based on a considerable body of literature which deliberates the distinctions between desktop GIS and Web GIS in geography education, although the comparison between different formats of GIS will not be one of the research objectives.Specific research questions include: (1) how does the use of Web GIS impact students' spatial thinking ability?(2) how do undergraduates reflect on their use of Web GIS in a class which conventionally involves very few GIS technologies?Both standardised quantitative assessment and qualitative interviews were employed in this study to address the two research questions.

GIS and Web GIS
With the development of computational and geospatial technologies, desktop applications have not remained the only format of GIS; instead, mobile technology and internet infrastructure have been forcefully integrated into GIS capabilities.In the context of geography education, the use of Web(−based) GIS, or so-called internet(−based) GIS, has been notably increasing in geography classrooms, which is supposed to be an efficient alternative to desktop GIS (Baker, 2005).Web GIS is "a form of GIS that is deployed using an Internet Web browser" (Bodzin et al., 2016, p. 280).Through specific web browsers, users of Web GIS can access up-to-date maps and other spatial data (Kim et al., 2013).Similar to desktop GIS, Web GIS mostly provides users with interfaces including a wide range of mapping tools to allow users to manipulate digital maps and conduct spatial analysis (Milson & Earle, 2008).
Despite similarities, there exist many differences between desktop GIS and web GIS other than the medium of delivery (desktop applications or web browsers).While desktop GIS is described as fully functional, Web GIS usually refers to limited functions in terms of mapping and spatial analysis which weaken the performance of Web GIS in expert geospatial analysis (Songer, 2010).Meanwhile, the barriers for using traditional desktop GIS are also obvious.Lloyd (2001) has contended that the software complexity, the lack of curriculum materials and the shortage of experienced GIS faculty had impeded the wide use of desktop GIS in higher geography education.Limited by the technical development in the early 2000s, Lloyd (2001) merely suggest solutions, like "a combination of new funding sources and careful attention to the design of a new computer classroom", "writing a series of computer mini-applications and accompanying learning activities", and "working with part-time and junior faculty members and graduate teaching assistants" (p.162).Nowadays, thanks to the development of computational and internet sciences, Web GIS seems to be an efficient alternative to desktop GIS in the classroom.Some scholars have attempted to adapt pedagogy to the rapidly developed GIS.For instance, Ricker and Thatcher (2017) suggest CyberGIS which relies on not only internet technology but also big data.Those advanced pedagogy has largely remained ideas and lacks experimental practices.In general, Web GIS "is more intuitive than previous versions of GIS with user-friendly interfaces which do not require a great deal of expert GIS knowledge to use" (Fargher, 2018, p. 2).Moreover, as Web GIS is usually free to be accessed through web browsers, it avoids expensive expenditure on purchasing typical GIS applications and the effort to install desktop GIS applications.
The user-friendly, time-saving and effort-saving features of Web GIS make it more suitable for school geography education (Baker, 2005; R. D. M. González & Torres, 2020).Compared to desktop GIS, school instructors and students do not have to experience a heavy cognitive load while employing Web GIS as a toolkit in the classroom and the users do not conduct complicated spatial analysis (Songer, 2010).Existing literature has suggested that both web GIS and desktop GIS can help students' learning in class and work better than a paper atlas or other conventional pedagogy (Bodzin et al., 2015;Milson & Earle, 2008).Given the similar functions of Web GIS and desktop GIS in geography education, the following literature review will take GIS as an umbrella term and does not distinguish specific kinds of GIS.

The effect of GIS on learning disciplinary knowledge
Either desktop GIS or Web GIS has been widely adopted as a pedagogical tool in higher geography education, particularly in courses at an introductory level which do not aim to deliver professional GIS or cartographic knowledge, like world geography, historical geography and health geography.Initially, GIS functioned as an efficient alternative to traditional teaching strategies.Rutherford and Lloyd (2001) make a comparative study between computer-aided instructional strategy, that is desktop GIS, and traditional lecture instruction in a world geography course at the undergraduate level and suggest GIS could significantly improve students' achievement.GIS also helpfully motivates students to actively enquire into problems proposed by instructors and creates a supportive and efficacious atmosphere in the classroom (Songer, 2010;Summerby-Murray, 2001).More importantly, researchers advocate GIS as a useful teaching approach because it benefits students' understanding of obscure concepts and complex spatial processes.In their class of earth and environmental system which transcends natural and social disciplines, Bodzin and Anastasio (2006) comment on the use of GIS "The implementation of Web-based GIS in conjunction with other content materials enables learners to analyse and synthesise large amounts data that would be much more difficult in other formats" (p.295).Park (2021) uses Web GIS to explain to students the spatial pattern of air pollution and health risks.More recently, researchers note the impact of social context on implementing GIS in higher education and advice on how higher education in developing countries better incorporate GIS into teaching (A.González et al., 2021).
As for courses which teach about GIS, teaching with GIS becomes compulsory for educators.Compared to courses discussed previously, pedagogical studies regarding professional GIS courses are interested in how to innovate conventional teaching approaches.For example, while Web GIS is usually used in human geography or nongeographical courses, Clark et al. (2007) suggest that Web GIS is also efficient and more popular among students in an introductory GIS course due to the self-paced interactive atmosphere it creates.There are also other formats of innovations like Carlson's (2007) field-based GIS, in which students are asked to bring a portable device installed with GIS software and experience the studied field in person.However, those innovative attempts remain rather less compared to other geographical courses.With the rapid development of computing and Internet technology, researchers also interrogate how the digital age as students' growing-up contexts make a difference in teaching GIS in the classroom (Harvey & Kotting, 2011).
Beyond higher education, GIS, particularly Web GIS or other kinds of minimal GIS, has been increasingly used as a pedagogical tool in school geographical or nongeographical classes.Similar to its use in universities, GIS in school classrooms also helps to illustrate disciplinary knowledge, abstract concepts and complex spatial processes, as well as creates a self-motivated classroom (Keiper, 1999;Reed & Bodzin, 2016).Due to the different purposes of higher education and school education, school educators intendedly emphasise that GIS helps children to establish common sense and basic knowledge of the whole society rather than merely specific disciplines.Milson and Earle (2008) find that Internet-based GIS stimulates students' cultural awareness and empathy for distant others through bringing remote issues to interfaces just in front of students.R. D. M. González and Torres (2020) argue that the implementation of Web GIS in school geography classes "contribute[s] to spatial citizenship to raise awareness of spatial values, civic engagement, and democratic participation" (pp.82).Pedagogical research in the school environment pays more attention to the interactions between students and teachers and takes the enthusiasm of teachers towards GIS into the discussion.While many teacher participants positively comment on the efficiency of GIS in teaching activities (Keiper, 1999;Kerski, 2003;Kim et al., 2013), teachers expressed varying attitudes towards the adoption of GIS (Bednarz & Schee, 2006;Walshe, 2017), which is quite understandable given the long-standing barriers regarding implementing GIS in school classrooms.In section 2.1, we have demonstrated the factors which limit the use of desktop GIS, such as high expenditures and complex installation.Although Web GIS can avoid most limitations of desktop GIS and seemingly suits school classrooms better, scholars have identified many other frustrations with using Web GIS.For example, school teachers may lack necessary Web GIS training in their trainee period; the use of Web GIS requires the re-design of the whole curriculum which brings extra work burdens; the irregular updates of selected Web GIS applications in the middle of academic terms may interrupt the pre-designed courses and any preparation; there are not satisfactory hardware facilities (e.g.computers and internet connections) in many schools, especially those in developing regions (Sinha et al., 2017;Walshe, 2017).

The effect of GIS on students' spatial thinking abilities
Spatial thinking abilities are directly relevant to geospatial technologies like GIS and become the primary concerns of geography educators and researchers (Marsh et al., 2007).In its report, Learning to Think Spatially, National Research Council (2006) conceptualises spatial thinking as a constructive amalgam containing knowledge in three aspects, which are the nature of space, the methods of representing spatial information and the processes of spatial reasoning, and the three aspects could reinforce each other.With the belief that spatial thinking ability as an important component of the educational curriculum at all levels could be taught and learnt, National Research Council suggests that "GIS had a clearly demonstrated potential as a support system for spatial thinking." (p.221) Inspired by the report, researchers started to explore the relevance between GIS and spatial thinking abilities through conducting various assessments involving experimental and control groups (Kim & Bednarz, 2013;Lee & Bednarz, 2012).The analyses of assessment scores hint towards a strong relationship between GIS learning and the improvement of spatial thinking abilities in both professional GIS courses and other geographical courses at the college level (Jo et al., 2016;Lee & Bednarz, 2009;Madsen & Rump, 2012).Bodzin et al. (2016) unpack the strong relationship in their study on a course of earth materials and earth history that GIS "supported their geospatial analysis for making inferences about space, geospatial patterns, and geospatial relationships among the data that were visualised in the Web GIS." (pp.279) Also, existing research argues that the efficiency of GIS in improving spatial thinking ability is conditional on pedagogical design, educational institutions and technological settings (Manson et al., 2014;Xiang & Liu, 2019).Studies at the level of higher education further suggest that the improvement of spatial thinking abilities potentially benefits students' acquisition of disciplinary contextual knowledge (Giorgis, 2015;Hou et al., 2016).As spatial thinking ability is key to everyday decision-making and applicable in various professional fields, enhanced spatial thinking due to GIS could increase students' employability (Bearman et al., 2015;Şeremet & Chalkley, 2015).
At the school level, researchers also suggest that teaching with GIS should not focus too much on technical details but scrutinise the cultivation of students' spatial thinking (Marsh et al., 2007).Different from studies at the university level, which intend to figure out the improved scope of spatial thinking abilities through various standardised assessments, studies regarding school students mostly adopt interviews, surveys and questionnaires designed by researchers themselves to examine whether students have better performance in terms of spatial thinking abilities and how their final learning outcome and overall cognitive abilities have been impacted (Baker & White, 2003;Bodzin et al., 2015;Fargher, 2018;Nielsen et al., 2011).Most studies suggest a positive effect of GIS on the two perspectives, despite the exact GIS formats (like Web GIS, digital atlas and other minimal GIS).Given the positive impacts and limited use of GIS in school education, researchers call for greater incorporation of GIS into school classrooms (R. D. M. González & Torres, 2020).
In short, while a large literature examines GIS as a pedagogical tool in either schools or universities, this topic still has great potential to stimulate more academic discussions.With a particular focus on the use of GIS in university geographical courses, we suggest that existing literature merely notes the curriculum of single courses while paying limited attention to the overarching design of whole educational programmes.Researchers should interrogate whether the Web GIS as a pedagogical tool would work differently in different contexts of educational programmes, such as between a programme involving abundant spatial technology training and a programme lacking this training.Moreover, although standardised assessments provide valuable quantitative data for the analysis of spatial thinking, the research in schools hints at the value of qualitative methods, which potentially support relevant research in universities (Jo et al., 2016).Qualitative methods might be the potential to further shed light on how the implementation of Web GIS evokes students' subjective feelings towards learning geography and using spatial technological tools.In this paper, we use the term of self-efficacy to refer to students' interest, desire and self-motivation in the future use of Web GIS or other spatial technological tools.

Research contexts and participants
The study was conducted among students of the Tourism Geography course in a Singaporean university, who were Year 1 or Year 2 undergraduates.According to the course curriculum, students needed to register for one tutorial session, which was designed to practise theoretical issues taught in lectures, and there were three time slots for students to choose according to their schedule.Given that all tutorial sessions would help students achieve compulsory learning goals, tutorial group 1 (W1) and group 3 (W3) were designed to be the experimental groups in this study which employed Web GIS as a pedagogical tool and group 2 (P2) was the control group which still used paper maps as usual.Before students registered for a specific tutorial group, they had been fully informed of the differences between groups, the overall course design and the research information.Thus, students could decide which tutorial group they were registering for and whether they participated in the study.According to the institutional regulations which ask students to free select tutorial sessions and restrict lecturers to interrupt students' selection, we as tutorial instructors did not advise on students' decisions and had rather limited capacities to control the balances between three tutorial sessions in terms of gender, disciplinary background, and GIS experience.Admittedly, self-selection bias might be caused in the following analyses.Through comparing the test scores of spatial thinking between experimental and control groups, the effect of Web GIS on spatial thinking could be examined.Although some researchers intend to test students' spatial thinking ability before class involving Web GIS and take the pre-class scores as the baseline for future analysis (e.g.Kim & Bednarz, 2013), we asked students to take the Spatial Thinking Abilities Test (STAT) only after class.The STAT is a standardised test to assess the spatial thinking ability of respondents, which will be demonstrated in detail in the methodology section.The reason why we did it was to avoid the analytical error caused by repeated participation in the same test.To put it more frankly, as all questions in the STAT adopted in this research have standard answers, students likely have better performance when they repeatedly answer the same questions.
Finally, 83 students were participating in the study.Table 1 displays the overview of participants which includes the exact number of participants by group, gender, major and GIS experience.In terms of gender, female students (about 69.88%) were more than male students (about 30.12%) in total number of students.From the perspective of major backgrounds, more non-geography students (about 55.42%) than geography students (about 44.58%) participated in this research, despite it being a geographical course.Notably, most students (66 out of 83, about 79.52%) did not have any GIS experience before the tutorial sessions; particularly, the number of students who used GIS before was significantly less than the number of students majoring in geography (17 to 37).The lack of GIS experience was understandable as GIS was not a strong branch in the Department of Geography where the study was conducted, and most students registered for more human geography courses than physical and GIS ones.With such background, the study potentially examines how the use of GIS as a pedagogical tool could make up for the lack of professional GIS training in terms of spatial thinking and self-efficacy.

The design of the researched tutorial sessions
While the tutorial classroom had access to desktop GIS and professional GIS instructors were based in the department, we still selected Web GIS as the primary pedagogical tool in this research.Web GIS is "ideal for a majority of classrooms that are not interested in the time, commitment and energy required of desktop GIS" (Baker, 2005, p. 46).As can be seen from Table 1, most students who attended the tutorial lacked the necessary GIS experience to conduct analyses on desktop GIS and nearly half of the students were from non-geographical majors which usually did not require geospatial analytics in their everyday studies.In this regard, although the tutorials belonged to a professional geographical course and desktop GIS is expected to provide more precise spatial analyses (Fargher, 2018;Lloyd, 2001), Web GIS appeared to be more suitable for students and the overarching course design.Specifically, an online mapping tool, MyMap, was selected as the primary Web GIS application in this study, which allowed users to create and customise maps by plotting specific places using the Google map interface (Figure 1).Within each tutorial group, students were required to complete the following tasks regarding volunteering tourism in teams of four.

Task 1
This task aimed to create a map of students' volunteer activities via either MyMap or paper maps.Students were asked to mark all overseas places where they had participated in volunteer activities in the past.Here we emphasised "overseas" because all students were Singaporeans and travelling within the city-state for volunteer or any other purposes could hardly be supposed as a kind of tourism.For the experimental groups, students were able to add map layers, put pins, draw lines and use any mapping tools on the base map after logging into the interface of MyMap with their Google accounts.
Figure 2 shows a map made by one team in the experimental groups.For the control group, each team was given two paper maps at different scales and they could use stickers (to identify the location of volunteer places) and markers (to make lines between places) to make their own maps.

Task 2
Each student was asked to answer a hypothetical question, about where to do volunteer work in future, and provide at least two reasons based on theories regarding volunteer tourism which had been demonstrated in lectures before tutorial sessions and their reading materials.For students in the experimental groups, they marked their interested places on the base map via putting digital pins and provided their reasons via the function of "add text" in MyMap.For students in the control group, they wrote down their reasons on stickers which also marked their interested place on the paper maps.

Task 3
Students were expected to discuss their answers in Task 2 with their teammates and further edit the map of their teams.After team discussion, all teams were sharing their maps in front of the whole tutorial groups through projectors (for the experimental groups) or presenting as posters (for the control group).
In the tutorial design, only MyMap tools which edit layers, points and lines on a map were used other than other tools with stronger analytical power.There were two reasons here.First, given the existence of the tutorial group using paper maps (P2), we had to ensure that the tasks assigned to the groups of Web GIS (W1 and W3) could be processed manually.Second, similar to the reason why Web GIS rather than desktop GIS was selected, student participants were unable to utilise many analytical tools of MyMap and conduct complicated geospatial analyses.

Spatial thinking ability test
At the end of each tutorial session, students took the Spatial Thinking Ability Test (STAT) through an online Google form at their own discretion.The STAT used in this study was developed by Lee and Bednarz (2012).As a standardised assessment of spatial thinking, its rigorousness, reliability and feasibility have been proved by existing work like Jo et al. (2016).The STAT includes 16 questions requiring either multiple choices or short responses, which help to identify spatial thinking abilities across eight aspects.These eight aspects are "( 1  mentally visualising 3-D images based on 2-D information [question 8]; (7) overlaying and dissolving map [question 9 to 12]; and (8) comprehending geographic features represented as points, line or polygon [question 13 to 16]" (Lee & Bednarz, 2012, p. 18).In this study, the experimental groups and the control group were using the same assessment for convenience to compare final test scores.Each student was given 15 minutes to complete the test.The question types and full question list of STAT are provided in Appendices A and B. The analysis of STAT scores was achieved through a range of statistical processing.

Semi-structured interviews
In this study, we also conduct semi-structured interviews to enhance our understanding of the effect of Web GIS on students' spatial thinking abilities.Although the STAT could shed light on the final impact of Web GIS, the standardised quantitative method hardly reflected students' self-efficacy towards using GIS and their personal feelings regarding the overarching design of tutorial sessions.We advertised the recruitment of interviewees after the STAT and provided available time slots for interviews to help them decide whether to participate in the follow-up research.Based on the interest expressed by students, six students were finally recruited to participate in interviews.As there were significantly more female students than male students in this class (58 to 25), we did not pursue a balanced gender structure while recruiting interviewees.Although the number of non-geography students (46) exceed the number of geography students (37) in the STAT, more geography students were recruited in the following-up interviews as very few non-geography students expressed interest in this.It might be because the research and relevant course were based in the department of geography and suited geography students better in terms of time availability.The overview of the interviewees could be seen in Table 2.All interviewees will be anonymised in the following texts.
There were two stages contained in each interview.In the first stage, students were asked their opinions on tutorial experience with Web GIS, their comments on (dis) advantages of Web GIS and the challenges encountered during tutorial sessions.After the first stage, interviewees would receive their scores for the STAT and the interview processed to the second stage, which aimed to bring forth students' personal inference about what were the key factors influencing their spatial thinking and their performance in the STAT.The full question list is provided in Appendix C.

Students' spatial thinking ability
The STAT scores collected from all three tutorial groups were aggregated and analysed in this section.Although 83 students took the STAT at the end of tutorial sessions, we excluded two uncompleted test forms collected from W1 from the analysis, which possibly influenced the accuracy of the following statistical processing.Thus, all analyses made in this section were based on 81 valid STAT forms.

STAT scores across tutorial groups
Given the setting of the experimental groups (W1 and W3) and the control group (P2), the first question which should be answered is whether the implementation of Web GIS took any impact on students' spatial thinking ability.Table 3 displays the mean value, SD, median value and other information of the three groups.All three statistical indexes suggest that students in W1 (Mean = 11.67,SD = 2.04, Median = 12) and W3 (Mean = 11.32,SD = 2.06, Median = 11) who used Web GIS for their tutorial tasks had a better performance than students in P2 (Mean = 10.34,SD = 3.11, Median = 10) who used paper maps.
Table 3 also suggests differences between the two experimental groups.Students in W1 received higher scores on STAT than students in W3.Considering the tutorial sessions delivered to W1 and W3 were the same, the difference was likely due to different majors and GIS experience.As can be seen in Table 3, W1 had the highest percentage of students majoring in geography and having GIS experiences beforehand and W3 had the lowest percentage.The long-term learning experience in geography and relevant GIS training had possibly endowed students in W1 with better spatial thinking abilities before the tutorial sessions (Jo et al., 2016).The comparison between P2 and W3 further suggests that the impact of Web GIS implementation on spatial thinking abilities might be stronger than the impact of pre-existing geographical experiences, because P2 had a higher percentage of students in geography major and with GIS experience, but received the lowest scores on STAT.When the two impact factors, the implementation of Web GIS and the pre-existing geographical experiences, functioned together, students' spatial thinking abilities could be further enhanced and the significant gap between W1 and P2 becomes rather understandable.

STAT scores across eight aspects of spatial thinking
The STAT enabled researchers to unpack spatial thinking abilities across eight different perspectives.With a probe into more details of STAT scores and careful comparison between the experimental groups and the control group, the study further revealed how the implementation of Web GIS influenced students' spatial thinking from different perspectives.Table 4 displays students' performance in eight aspects of STAT questions, which have been demonstrated in section 3.3.It was still W1 that made the best scores out of all three groups.Students in W1 received higher scores in six (Type 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8) out of eight types than students in P2 did and in four types (Type 1, 2, 4, 7) than students in W3 did.The outstanding performance could be explained by both the use of Web GIS and the pre-existing learning experience of geography.Students in W3 had a notable performance in Type 5, 6 and 8, which examine students' abilities to correlate spatially distributed phenomena, visualise 3D images based on 2D information and comprehend geographic features.Considering the low percentage of students majoring in Geography and with pre-existing GIS experience, it emphasises that the implementation of Web GIS had particular advantages to improve students' ability to understand complicated spatial patterns and visualise spatial data (Bodzin et al., 2016).However, it is reluctant to assert that students in W3 achieved overwhelming scores over their counterparts in P2, as they scored higher on merely half of the types, namely Type 1, 5, 6, and 8, and received the same scores for questions of Type 2. The comparison between P2 and W3 further indicates the usefulness of Web GIS in improving spatial thinking, while also suggesting that there were perhaps some limitations of Web GIS.
The limitations of Web GIS were further noted in questions of Type 3 and 4, in which students in P2 received the best scores.These questions examine students' ability to choose the ideal location based on the given spatial factors and to visualise a slope profile based on a topographic map, which requires contextual knowledge from geography and other social disciplines.The mixed disciplinary background of students in P2 likely helped them to solve these questions.In this regard, the cultivation of spatial thinking abilities may benefit from the collaborations between geography and other relevant disciplines, which, however, need to be supported by any further empirical evidence in future research.
In general, the experimental groups (W1 and W3) had better performance than the control group (P2) in most types.This result resonates with data analysis in the last section, which indicates the positive impact of both the use of Web GIS and the preexisting learning experience of geography could enhance students' performance in the STAT.All three tutorial groups received their own best scores in questions of Type 1 (comprehending direction and orientation) and the lowest scores in questions of Type 6 (mentally visualising 3-D images based on 2-D information), which implies that the satisfying performance of spatial thinking is conditioned by not only the implementation

Students' self-efficacy towards using GIS
The interviews with six students in the experimental groups who used Web GIS for their tutorial session reveal how students reflected on their experiences with Web GIS and how much the implementation of Web GIS altered their attitudes towards GIS and more general geography learning.All interviewees agreed that using Web GIS platforms such as MyMap had made their tutorial experiences more interesting than conventional classroom teaching.According to two of our interviewees (S and J), incorporating Web GIS into tutorials provided an engaging approach to learning geography, especially since they devote most tutorial sessions to discussing specific empirical cases or reading materials.The introduction of Web GIS activities can thus bring about novel ways of engaging students during classroom time.
I think it (Web GIS) can be interesting for a lesson because many of the Geography lessons focus a lot on the readings and just regurgitate the content in the readings.So, this (Web GIS) can add colour and fun elements to the tutorial session . . .(S, Geography, Year 1 UG) (Web GIS gives) visual engagement to better grasp spatial aspects of geography and it helps to give variety to classroom learning besides discussion and such . ..(J,Sociology, Year 3 UG) Interestingly, the very nature of Web GIS being a hands-on learning platform for activities in a classroom setting can, in turn, bring about a higher level of students' involvement in the learning activity.Using Web GIS requires users to be keen on the geospatial technology and gives students opportunities to practice and apply the conceptual issues they had learnt via a more visually, understandable format.As mentioned by E: (Web GIS) gives students a more hands-on approach, even when we are not exactly out in the field.Through the implementation of Web GIS, students obtained the opportunity to train their ability to see spatially defined theories or concepts in concrete, virtual forms.Thus, the introduction of Web GIS into tutorials brought forth the connection between abstract contextual knowledge to real world events.As W (Philosophy, Year 4 UG) shared, "(Using Web GIS is) quite fun as I can see how Geography can be applied in the world rather than just as theories . . .". Therefore, Web GIS as a pedagogical tool can re-enforce the overarching teaching objective in a visual format where students are able to comprehensively understand abstract spatial knowledge with "real world" spatial patterns.MyMap, the main Web GIS tool used in the study, was also identified to be an interesting and user-friendly platform, particularly compared to traditional GIS platforms like ArcGIS.All six interviewees gave positive feedback when they were asked to describe their experience with MyMap through the tutorial, especially among students who have no prior knowledge of GIS.The user-friendly feature of Web GIS became the greatest attraction for student interviewees to use it, as Web GIS enabled them to spend less time and effort learning geospatial technologies while they could complete tutorial tasks on time.This finding recalls arguments in existing research, that Web GIS works effectively to remove multiple barriers of desktop GIS in teaching activities (Songer, 2010).In addition to greatly easing off their learning journey, the interviews further suggest that the experience with Web GIS changed the negative "stereotype" of GIS software in students' minds.Given that very few students in this study had GIS experiences before the tutorial sessions, they usually, while may imprecisely, thought that GIS is commonly associated with having good background knowledge of coding and other complicated computing skills, which was following the findings in existing literature like Lloyd (2001) and Songer (2010).This is especially so for human geographers who tended to view GIS as a tool associated with data driven methodology, coding and physical geography related concepts.Although students' idea about GIS has certain rationality (Bearman et al., 2015(Bearman et al., , 2016)), it inevitably prevents students' attempts from including GIS in their study, at least before they used MyMap in this tutorial session.S directly addressed this point as she was aware of the need to know computational coding when using GIS, and that had made her apprehensive in using the associated platform.Unlike desktop GIS like ArcGIS, Web GIS has simplified the technically and spatially complicated functions which makes it highly appealing to students, especially among those with no GIS background.Based on that, students were more receptive to the usage of such technology in the classroom when they viewed this as a tool with fewer technical requirements as compared to conventional desktop GIS.This, in turn, brought about stronger motivation to be engaged with such technology which could potentially increase their self-efficacy toward using GIS and the whole geographical discipline.As some students raised during interviews, students would generally be more engaged to learn about spatial concepts if there were more usages and practices in using Web GIS technology for tutorials and other classroom activities in their university.
(I think when) students are interested in spatial technology, they would be more engaged in using such a platform to make the study processes more efficient.(L,Geography, Year 2 UG) (Using My Map) was a simple and fun way to see things spatially and that could be sufficient to intrigue students to learn more about Geography.
(J, Geography, Year 2 UG) In short, all interviewed students had positively reflected on their learning experiences with Web GIS and indicated the changing ideas about geospatial technologies and the interest to adopt Web GIS in future learning.The above discussion has shown how Web GIS as a pedagogical tool can result in a higher level of self-efficacy towards using GIS software, which they had used to avoid in their study experience, and how the learning experience with Web GIS can evoke stronger interest in learning geography.

Concluding remarks
Combining the standardised assessment, Spatial Thinking Abilities Test, and semistructured interviews, the study investigates how Web GIS as a pedagogical tool impacted students' spatial thinking and how students personally reflected on their learning experience with Web GIS in a course of tourism geography in a Singaporean university.As for the impact of Web GIS on spatial thinking, the comparison of STAT scores between the experimental groups and the control group suggested that the implementation of Web GIS effectively enhanced students' spatial thinking.Our analyses also indicated that students' disciplinary background and pre-existing GIS experiences meditated their spatial thinking.The study experience in geography and relevant GIS training helpfully improved students' abilities to solve spatial issues, but the overall improvement of spatial thinking also required collaboration between knowledge of different disciplines.
Regarding students' reflection on their experience with Web GIS, the inclusion of Web GIS into classroom teaching which usually involves very few geospatial technologies notably changed students' negative stereotypes of GIS and stimulated their self-efficacy, which further equipped them with stronger motivation to continue learning geography.
The paper could strongly make up for existing debates around whether and how (Web) GIS could serve higher education of geography as a pedagogical tool.While the pedagogical study of (Web) GIS mostly fails to incorporate qualitative material into a discussion (similar arguments could be seen in Guan et al. (2019)), the interviews with students enabled us to unpack how students viewed their own learning experiences regarding GIS and spatial thinking.The study further proved the feasibility of the STAT in diverse social contexts and populations suggested by Jo et al. (2016) by investigating its implementation in Singapore, a less researched context in scholarship adopting STAT.Moreover, the university setting also constituted the unique research context in this paper.All data collection was based in a university where rather few GIS courses and relevant technical training have been included in the classroom.With the specific design of researched tutorial sessions, we would argue that if students lack GIS training in the whole programme, short-term exposure to GIS or perhaps other geospatial technologies could significantly improve students' performance of spatial thinking.
It must be admitted that there are some potentials to further polish this research in the future.If the STAT scores and interview data could had been collected from more tutorial sessions and if more students could had been recruited into this study, the study would have a richer database for the interest of more rigorous analysis.Moreover, given that spatial thinking might be subject to various pedagogical, institutional and technological conditions (Manson et al., 2014), a probe into these conditions and their relationship with the integration of GIS should also be critical for the interest of students' spatial thinking.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. MyMap result of a team in the experimental groups.

Table 1 .
Summary of participants.

Table 3 .
Mean, SD, and Median scores on STAT by tutorial groups.

Table 4 .
STAT scores by the eight types of spatial thinking abilities.
It's quite fun to mark out and see the world from MyMap.I think it (MyMap) gives a very quick and easy reference because it is not easy to zoom into details especially when you print out maps.(MyMap) gives a very big overview[in terms of understanding the world] . . .
I think based on what we know . . .GIS is a tough skill to do because there is coding involved in it eg: Python . . .so for most Arts major, that is seen as kind of a difficult skill to learn.Web-based GIS is a bit easier (for us to use) because it removes the coding component which by itself is quite difficult.We are still Arts students and in general, it can be quite difficult for us to see things spatially, using the GIS way of thinking, [let alone using codes to create maps].(MyMap) is [thus] easier relative to the coding side of GIS.(S, Geography, Year 1 UG)