New Perspectives in Science Education

Research shows that nature field trips have a positive effect on pupils in both cognitive and attitudinal aspects (1y 2). Most have focused on the pupils, and have described key aspects of these teaching-learning activities together with their great complexity. However, few have been directed at considering the specific knowledge that teachers use in these activities as a part of their overall pædagogical content knowledge. This lack of information is even more patent with respect to initial teacher education. The aim of this work is to analyze in an exploratory way the assessment that the prospective teachers in early childhood, primary and secondary education make about the effect of the nature field trips in their students in transversal aspects. The data correspond to 175 teachers in training of different educational stages, 63 for children, 62 for primary and 50 for secondary. We use a single reflection on the merits of the science field trips with respect to the classroom. They follow the didactic proposal (3). 82 of these future teachers have pointed out advantages in one or some issues of a transversal nature to the Didactics of Sciences. Among them, aspects related to Environmental Education stand out, in this way they point out advantages when it comes to promoting respect for living beings and raising awareness about environmental problems. In less occasions they indicate that the exits to the natural environment help to work the personal relations. Some professors also point out that exits to the natural environment can favor teamwork. The rest points to very diverse issues such as creativity, autonomy and relationships with other areas of knowledge. With these data, no significant differences were found in terms of the number of teachers in training that show advantages in cross-cutting aspects, either because of their educational stage or gender.. That study was supported by Project EDU2016-77007-R of Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and Project IB16140 of the Junta de Extremadura.

Keywords: Nature field trips, sciencie education, pre-service teachers, Biology education, video analysis.

References:
[1] Meredith, J.E., Fortner, R.W. y Mullins, G.W. (1997). Model of affective learning for nonformal science education facilities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34(8), 805-817.
[2] Aguilera, D. (2018). La salida de campo como recurso didáctico para enseñar ciencias. Una revisión sistemática. Revista Eureka Sobre Enseñanza y Divulgación de Las Ciencias, 15(3), 3103.
[3] Costillo, E., Borrachero, A.B., Villalobos, A.B., Mellado, V., y Sánchez J. (2014) Utilización de la modelización para trabajar las salidas al medio natural en profesores en formación de educación secundaria. Bio-grafia: Escritos sobre la Biología y su Enseñanza, 7(13): 165-175.