Why Field Trips?

1. Why Field Trips? Positive Impact of Field Trips on Learning By Tommy Diamond

2. The Theory • Field trips allow students to see things as they really are-complicated and imperfect-and not as they might be idealized in a textbook.It gives the student a chance to experience and to see the relevance of a subject in the real world.

3. Five Attributed Values of Field Trips • Providing first-hand experience • Stimulating interest & motivation in science • Giving meaning to learning and interrelationships • Observation and perception skills • Personal and social development

4. Field trips inspire students to continue other scientific studies • Data compiled in Mesa, AZ schools demonstrated that “96% of those students entering from a hands on science program in elementary grades opted to continue their science studies in high school, while only 4% of the students in the textbook study program continued in high school science programs” (Milson, 1990,p.2).

5. Meeting the Challenge of Interest • As a science teacher, it is my goal and challenge to improve thinking skills, interest, and success in the area of science. To do this I feel it is sometimes necessary to step out of the conventional/formal classroom and into the world that surrounds us.

6. Providing first-hand experience • Above right students take water sample test on Galveston Island. • Below right students excavate dinosaur bone fossil from Big Bend National Park

7. Observation and perception skills • Students observing geological features in the Marathon Basin area.

8. Personal and social development • Student pose for a group picture at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis mountains of Texas.