Developing pre-service teachers' preparedness for inquiry with digital mapping tools in geography

Starting from the school year 2026/2027, Slovakia will implement the State edu-cational programme for primary and lower secondary education (Ministry of education, 2023), introducing performance-based and content-related changes in geography educa-tion. For the third educational cycle (6th –9th grades) the curriculum sets learning activities that can be conducted using geoinformation technologies. These activities include geo-graphical inquiry, the use of statistical data for acquiring, processing, presenting the infor-mation, identifying the spatial relationships, creating a map, and drawing conclusions. The achievement of such educational goals may vary depending on the understanding and preparedness of teachers. In this context, it is essential that future geography teachers ac-quire the knowledge and skills to apply inquiry-based teaching strategies effectively. This paper examines inquiry-based learning and teaching with digital mapping tools aimed at pre-service geography teachers by equipping them to design their own inquiry-based tasks. A set of twenty-eight geography tasks was analysed from didactic and subject-specific viewpoints. Findings show pre-service geography teachers cultivated their expertise in un-derstanding and designing the inquiry-based tasks with the use of selected digital mapping tools in topics of school geography. Their most frequent design was a task to create a the-matic map representing a demographic indicator of Slovak population using the ArcGIS Online platform. The study concludes with recommendations for integrating inquiry-based learning with digital mapping tools into geography teacher training programmes.