MAPPING OF THE WORLD IMAGE IN THE MIND OFA HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT (BASED ON THE GEOGRAPHY SCHOOL TEXTBOOK ANALYSIS)
When preparing any training and educational projects, including museum ones, it is important to have information about the existing target audience knowledge of the relevant subjects. In particular, if knowledge in the field of social and economic geography of the world is concerned, and the target audience are high school students, high school world geography textbooks can be used as a source of information about the awareness of the audience on this subject. The frequency of references to countries, cities and other place names in school textbooks can be used as a measure of the potential of student knowledge of geographic objects, forming in his/her mind the complete image of the world. This article provides an overview of the scientific disciplines and methods for studying image-bearing geographical spaces (i.e. spaces that exist in the mind of people or social groups). In particular, the author gives examples of studies in which it is different texts that are sources of cognitive information. The author of the article conducted content analysis of the text of a world economic geography textbook for grade 10 students (V.P. Maksakovsky, 2012 edition). Based on compiled database of references to place names a map was made. This map clearly reflects the world view of a high school student formed upon reading this textbook. At the end of the article the author draws conclusions about greater and lesser awareness among high school students about different regions of the world.