An Empirical Study of Situational Teaching: Agricultural Location in High School Geography

In China’s most recent round of curriculum reform, the “one situation to the end” (OSTE) situational teaching method has been successfully introduced in geography classes to improve students’ ability to solve problems in real-life situations. Taking an agricultural location course as an example, this study analyzes the implementation of situational teaching and discusses the effect of the OSTE method on the topic of sustainable development in the teaching of geography. Using a quasi-experimental design and by distributing a questionnaire to teachers in a Chinese high school, the following findings were obtained: (1) almost all teachers use some form of situational teaching, and the OSTE method has been widely used; (2) OSTE contributes to students’ awareness of sustainable and circular development, but it is not associated with an improvement in geographical skills; and (3) students are mostly interested in the promotion of higher-order thinking, a positive emotional experience, active learning, and the acquisition of systematic knowledge instead of fragmented knowledge. In short, OSTE is an efficient teaching method for geography classes, especially given how it fosters students’ sustainable development ideas. We suggest enriching the understanding of OSTE through teaching-training, jointly developed situations using students’ existing experiences, and well-designed question chains with more opportunities for interaction.