IDEA SET
IDEA SET
National Geography Standards Index
National Geography Standards Index
"Geography is for life in every sense of that expression: lifelong, life-sustaining, and life-enhancing."
Grades
4, 8, 12
Subjects
Geography, Physical Geography, Human Geography
“The world facing the high school graduates of 2025 will be even more crowded than the world of today. The physical environment will be even more threatened. The global economy will be even more competitive and interconnected.
Understanding and responding to the challenges and opportunities of the world in the twenty-first century will require many skills; the capacities to think and communicate mathematically and scientifically will remain at a premium. Geographic literacy will also be necessary for reasons of enhancing economic competitiveness, preserving quality of life, sustaining the environment, and ensuring national security. As individuals and as members of society, humans face decisions on where to live, what to build where, how and where to travel, how to conserve energy, how to wisely manage scarce resources, and how to cooperate or compete with others.
Making all of these decisions, personal and collective, requires a geographically informed person—someone who sees meaning in the arrangement of things on Earth’s surface, who sees relations between people, places, and environments, who uses geographic skills, and who applies spatial and ecological perspectives to life situations. Geographic skills enable a person to understand the connections between patterns of rivers and the physical processes that create them, between patterns of cities and the human processes that create them, and between what happens in the places in which we live and what happens in places throughout the world, near and far.
The goal of the National Geography Standards is to enable students to become geographically informed through knowledge and mastery of three things: (1) factual knowledge; (2) mental maps and tools; (3) and ways of thinking.”
—Geography For Life: National Geography Standards, Second Edition
Geography Standard 1
Geography Standard 2
Geography Standard 3
How to analyze the spatial organization of people, places, and environments on Earth’s surface
The World in Spatial Terms
Geography Standard 4
The physical and human characteristics of places
Places and Regions
Geography Standard 5
That people create regions to interpret Earth’s complexity
Places and Regions
Geography Standard 6
Geography Standard 7
Geography Standard 8
Geography Standard 9
Geography Standard 10
Geography Standard 11
Geography Standard 12
Geography Standard 13
Geography Standard 14
How human actions modify the physical environment
Environment and Society
Geography Standard 15
How human actions modify the physical environment
Environment and Society
Geography Standard 16
The changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution, and importance of resources
Environment and Society
Geography Standard 17
How to apply geography to interpret the past
The Use of Geography
Geography Standard 18
How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future.
The Uses of Geography
Media Credits
The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.
Web Producer
Director
Last Updated
September 17, 2024
For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.
Media
If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.
Text
Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service.
Interactives
Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.