From Earth Observation Access to Spatial Evidence Literacy: Evidentiary Alignment in General-Education Geoscience Communication

Abstract. As environmental challenges become increasingly complex, general education in higher education faces the challenge of preparing students to interpret and communicate environmental information across disciplinary boundaries. Earth Observation (EO) data and geospatial technologies are increasingly available through open archives, cloud platforms, and web maps. However, the expansion of access to spatial data does not automatically enable learners to understand how such data are interpreted, evaluated, and transformed into evidence. This study examines how EO-integrated general education curricula function as sites of curriculum-based geoscience communication, where expert EO and geospatial knowledge is transformed into accessible, communicable, and assessable forms of spatial evidence for non-specialist undergraduates. Using qualitative document analysis, we examine publicly available curriculum materials from 20 undergraduate EO-integrated general education courses in selected APEC higher-education contexts. We analyze the transformation of EO and geospatial knowledge across six curricular dimensions, namely course positioning, learning outcomes, project tasks, scaffolding, assessment, and evidentiary expectations, as well as the role of evidentiary alignment in shaping this transformation. The analysis identifies four patterns of evidentiary alignment, ranging from courses that primarily introduce satellite imagery and geospatial applications to those that require evidence-based reasoning with spatial data. Most sampled courses demonstrate intermediate levels of evidentiary alignment, asking students to interpret spatial patterns or produce maps and Story Maps. These tasks connect EO and geospatial data to climate, sustainability, hazards, urban change, Digital Earth, or geospatial literacy, but evidentiary expectations remain rarely explicit in publicly available documents, especially regarding data quality, uncertainty, scale, validation, and limitations. By extending the understanding of geoscience communication beyond the transmission of scientific information, this study highlights evidentiary alignment as a curriculum-level perspective for examining how curricula transform EO and geospatial knowledge into spatial evidence and create opportunities for developing spatial evidence literacy among non-specialist learners.