New Perspectives in Science Education

In outdoor experience-based learning there is often a focus on learning while the influence of the pupils’ attitudes, their conceptual profiles, are less well studied. In the Swedish curriculum for elementary school - pupils aged 10-13, there are several learning outcomes connected to sustainable development. In Biology, one of the learning outcomes relates to “People’s dependence on, and the impact on nature, and what this means for sustainable development”. Some of the learning outcomes also aims directly at attitudes towards nature: “Nature as a resource for recreation and experiences and what responsibilities we have when using it”.

In this study we analyze the effect of outdoor experiences on attitudes and conceptual profiles for school children. In Botkyrka municipality south of Stockholm in Sweden, all children in fifth-grade is going on a field trip visiting a lake. We constructed a questionnaire which was answered by 185 pupils first on the way to the lake, and secondly once again on the way back from the lake. The questions asked were: Is nature important for us humans? Is nature interesting/boring? Is nature dangerous? Would you spend spare time in nature? Do you like outdoor education? All questions were answered at a ten graded Likert scale.

Applying linear mixed models we found that the more unimportant the pupils thought nature was for us humans, the more they changed their attitude towards important. The same pattern was found also for all the other response variables – the general pattern is that the field day worked as intended and in line with the curriculum. On the other hand, when we analyze the change in attitude as explained by the scores from the other questions a more complex pattern arise, e.g.pupils that from the start claimed that they did not want to spend their spare time in nature found nature even more boring after the day at the lake.

The attitude questions were used to construct comprehensive conceptual profiles using ordination techniques. Three main groups could be identified – one group along the interesting/boring-spare time – outdoor education axis and two separate groups, interestingly composed by those finding nature important and dangerous and v.v.