Students Lost in Geography, Survey Reveals : Education: 15% of high school seniors thought the Mississippi River emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Teaching methods are part of the problem.

In an indictment of how U.S. schools teach geography, a government study of American high school seniors released Wednesday indicates that many students are graduating largely ignorant about the world.

“The Geography Learning of High-School Seniors,” a 78-page report by the U.S. Department of Education, reveals that while 85% of students can locate the Soviet Union on a map, a confused minority can’t differentiate between latitude and longitude, use maps effectively or understand what causes earthquakes. Relatively few of the students tested displayed a firm grasp of environmental problems and world economic relations.

Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos said students’ answers indicate “most of what they learned about geography they did not learn in school,” but from television.

“Unless we place a new emphasis on studying geography,” he said, “we’re passing on to our children the stewardship of a world they literally do not know.”

Education experts said parents are bringing up their children in an environment without atlases or globes and sending them to schools where many teachers have little knowledge of physical and cultural geography.

In the United States, only one in seven high school students takes a geography course, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers.

When it is taught, geography is often integrated into other courses, such as history, social studies and science, said the report, which was based on a multiple-choice test given in 1988 to 3,030 students in 304 public and private schools nationwide.

Some excerpts:

--71% of the students correctly identified Latin America on a map, but 15% confused it with sub-Saharan Africa. Only 37% could locate Southeast Asia, site of America’s longest war.

--72% could identify the world’s major exporters of oil, but only 48% knew the areas of major U.S. coal deposits. While two-thirds of the students correctly indicated that the Mississippi River emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, 15% thought its terminus was the Atlantic Ocean, while more than 10% picked the Great Lakes.

--When asked the cause of the decline of forests in the American Midwest, 65% correctly answered “the growth of farming.” But 20% attributed the deforestation to forest fires.

--In a map showing population concentrations, almost one-fourth of the students mistakenly labeled them “abundant mineral deposits.” Some 16% indicated that ships traveling from New York to London went through the Panama Canal. Some 32% apparently thought that Finland has a tropical or desert climate.

“Some of the results are encouraging, but most are disturbing and confirm what we already know: An unacceptably high percentage of American high school graduates have not learned geography,” said Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, which co-financed the study with the National Center for Education Statistics.

Nationwide, students correctly answered slightly more than half of the questions, although scores in the Southeast were lower than in the West, Midwest and Northeast. White males performed better in geography than their female peers, the study found.

GEOGRAPHY TEST How 3,030 high school seniors performed in a nationwide government survey on knowledge of geography. In percent. Finding nations, cities on a map. All: 57% Male: 63 Female: 52 Showing how to use maps. All: 53 Male: 56 Female: 49 Knowing who lives where and what products countries export. All: 60 Male: 63 Female: 57 Climate dynamics, ecological issues, geology. All: 58 Male: 61 Female: 54