Attitude of Senior Secondary School Teachers Towards Education Field Trip in Biology in Ilorin Metropolis

Attitude of Senior Secondary School Teachers Towards Education Field Trip in Biology in Ilorin Metropolis

Chapter One

Purpose of study

The main purpose of this study is to find out the attitudes of biology teachers about field trips and their pre-service preparation. To this end, the study aims to explore and understand biology teachers’ attitudes and attitudes about field trips in terms of planning and implementing. Besides that the biology teachers’ attitudes and attitudes are compared according to their gender, the school types where they teach, their year of teaching, and their educational level. Moreover, the attitude towards their own pre-service preparation is determined. At the end of all comparisons and data analysis, an alternative means of preparation is suggested for biology teacher preparation programs about field trips.

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

School field trips in education

Types of field trips

Field trips are considered as the supplementary activities designed for better learning outside the classroom and they promote the student interest towards the classroom lessons (Olson, Cox-Petersen, & McComas, 2001). Because of the undeniable benefits of field trips in learning most of the studies on field trips show that they are divided into categories based on the educational purpose, location, distance and duration of field trips.

Firstly, the educational purposes of field trips are creating interest among the students, participating in interdisciplinary work, being aware of innovations in teaching and learning, seeing difficulties in life and understanding contextual relationship between the classroom lessons and environment (Tal, 2001). Moreover, Tal and Morag (2009) add that other educational aims of field trips are providing first-hand experience, stimulating motivation in science, adding relevance to learning, strengthening observation and attitude skills. For supporting the students in learning the reasons of field trips are summarized as having autonomy, active involvement, collaboration with classmates and teachers, interaction with the people in field trip locations for learning, effectiveness of learning and concretization of classroom lessons (Tal& Morag, 2009). Furthermore, the field trips are not only conducted for students but also for the teachers. To illustrate, the study of Kisiel in 2013 states that the field trips give opportunities to the teachers in pedagogy and deeper science knowledge through implementation and observation. This idea is supported by the study of Bennet and Heafner in 2004 which claims that the teachers implement field trips also promote the education about the environment since by being part of the environment in field trips they have inquiry and reflection on nature and the environmental issues. As another educational purpose category, when the school trips are designed by the schools or educational authorities in a well-planned way they are called formal field trips (Rennie,2007) because these types of field trips are in a documented format and students follow a structured trip for individual learning. However, when the field trips are not well structured or done with non- school related purposes they are called non-formal and informal field trips respectively. School related non-formal field trips are less structured, done for just observation and not individual based learning activities while non-school related field trips are done by families or by learners just for intrinsic motivation (Rennie, 2007). The only disadvantage of these types of field trips may be the students do not understand the educational purpose of field trips and do it for just entertainment since the learning is not evaluated.

Secondly, a field trip can be implemented in different types of locations according to many studies hence the classrooms cannot provide all learning concepts in a closed area. Thus, the field trip areas act as classrooms according to the purposes. Some of the locations used as field trips areas are:

CHAPTER THREE

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Introduction

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In this study the biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips and their pre-service preparation was determined by a survey that is designed by two instructors, from a non-profit university in Nigeria. The researcher of this study collected the data by using the already developed tool, analyzed the data and suggested ideas for better development of field trips during pre-service preparation. Based on the purpose of the research the study was conducted with biology teachers from several private and public schools in Rivers state.

This chapter presents the methods used in the study. Additionally, the participants of the study, the instruments and methods used for data collection and the methods used for statistical analysis are described.

Research design

The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes of biology teachers on the benefits, challenges and their confidence level about field trips, in addition to their pre-service preparation for field trips. To draw a general conclusion in line with the aim of this study for the biology teacher population in Nigeria, a quantitative research was designed. Thus, survey, as a type of quantitative research, is an adequate method to collect information from a sample to draw a general conclusion about the target population in order to investigate the attitudes or attitudes of the participants about a specific topic by asking questions and then by analyzing the answers of these questions (Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun, 2012). For this reason, a survey was administered to the biology teachers from public and private high schools in Rivers state, who have experience in the profession. Moreover, for the first research question, a correlational analysis was done by analyzing the relationship among the variables of year of teaching and teachers’ attitude towards field trips. By that way, it is possible to show whether two or more quantitative variables are related. Then, for the second, third and fourth research questions the differences between the groups about the attitudes were analyzed by comparing the quantitative means of groups. This type of statistical analysis fit strongly to comparison analysis. Lastly, the attitudes of biology teachers about pre-service field trip preparation were presented by percentages and means as a significant way of descriptive statistics with a single and simple number instead of representing whole data. To sum up, the descriptive and inferential survey statistics were given since the main purpose of the study is to have a holistic view related to the attitudes of biology teachers about field trips for benefits, challenges, their confidence level and pre-service preparation according to their year of teaching, their level of education, types of schools where the participants work, their gender and their preparation level during pre-service education (Fraenkel et al., 2012). Based on the results, the hypotheses testing for the research questions are indicated by the survey analysis on teachers’ attitudes towards field trips, what kind of trainings they had on field trips in their pre-service education and accordingly what are possible the suggestions to retrofit the field trip education of teachers during pre-service preparation.

Population of study

The study was designed to explore the biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips and their pre-service preparation. Thus the population of interest in this research included the all biology teachers in Nigeria and the target population included the all biology teachers in Rivers state, Nigeria. Target population size was 1513 (1147 female and 366 male biology teachers) when this study is conducted in schools and there were 524 (377 female and 147 male) biology teachers in private schools and 989 (770 female and 219 male) biology teachers in public schools. However, in this research the sample is limited to 23 teachers from 10 public high schools and 16 teachers from four private high schools located in three different towns of Rivers state (N=39, 36 female and 3 male biology teachers). The ratio of female and male biology teacher numbers of the sample did not represent the actual ratio. Table 2 below presents the sample with the numbers of the teachers from both type of schools and the response rates of the sample from the target population.

From all public high schools in Rivers state, Science and Anatolian High Schools participated in this study were selected through cluster random sampling rather than selecting the teachers individually by simple random sampling from all public high schools (Fraenkel et al., 2012). By this way, the biology teachers were included in this study from certain kinds of public schools. Furthermore, the private schools were selected by convenience sampling method since they were available during the conduction of this study (Fraenkel et al., 2012). Since, some of the public schools are partnership schools of Graduate School of Education at Bilkent University where the pre-service teachers had teaching practice chances. Moreover, the only criteria for selection of biology teachers in the context that they had at least one year of teaching in biology lessons in high school. Therefore, the teachers from the selected school were in the best position to have the answers all of the research questions of this research.

CHAPTER FOUR

RESULTS

Survey results

The results of the study were obtained by analyzing the survey. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS, v.24.0) was used to do the analysis of collected data.

The survey consists of three sections and these are demographic information, general information about field trips in the biology department of the participant’s current school and information about the pre-service field trip preparation. The SPSS results about the study are given according to these sections and parallel to research questions.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION, RECOMMENDATIONS

Discussion of findings

In this study, the attitudes of biology teachers about field trips’ challenges and benefits, their confidence level during field trip activities and their pre-service preparation were explored through a survey. The survey was administered to the participants of the research then data analysis was accomplished by SPSS. The results of the analysis were interpreted for the relationship between the year of experience and teachers’ attitudes, the difference between educational level, school types and gender. Additionally, the teachers’ attitude towards field trip preparation were evaluated. The findings according to the analysis results expressed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the year of experience in teaching and teachers’ attitude towards field trip benefits and teachers’ confidence level. On the other hand, there was a statistically significant correlation between the total year of teaching and teachers’ attitude towards field trip challenges. As the year of experience increases the teachers consider the field trips as more challenging. Moreover, the difference between the teachers according to their educational levels were evaluated for the attitude towards field trips. It was found that there was no statistically significant difference between the doctorate, master and undergraduate graduates related to attitudes on field trip benefits and confidence level. When the challenges were examined for these three groups, there was a statistically significant difference between the undergraduate graduates and other two groups. In addition to these results, since the teachers from private and public high school may have different opportunities in their schools it was examined whether any difference in their attitudes for challenges, benefits and confidence levels about field trips. The results showed that there was a statistically significant school type difference in terms of the attitudes. To clarify, when the public and private school teachers were compared, the public school biology teachers faced with more challenges, the private school biology teachers thought the field trips are really beneficial and the private school biology teachers had higher confidence level about field trip activities. Additionally, when the gender difference was evaluated for attitudes, there was no statistically significant difference found between female and male biology teachers about field trip benefits and confidence level. Barely, the female teachers had more confidence in some of the activities than male teachers and these were to enhance student learning, to foster critical thinking and to monitor group work. On the other hand, when the teachers were evaluated for the challenges of field trips, it was discovered that the male teachers stated more difficulties about field trips than female teachers. Lastly, the teachers’ responses about their pre- service preparation were evaluated for involvement level, effectiveness in current teaching, participation level of the activities and the importance of field trips for teaching.

The discussions of the given analyses were detailed in upcoming sections to be able to answer the following research questions:

What are the attitudes of teachers about field trip challenges, benefits and their confidence level?

What is the relationship between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips and their year of teaching experience?
What are the differences between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips according to their level of education?
What are the differences between public and private school biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips?
What are the differences between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips according to gender?
What are the biology teachers’ attitude towards their pre-service teacher education program regarding field trip preparation?
What are the differences between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips according to their level of participation?

Major findings and conclusions

What are the attitudes of teachers about field trip challenges, benefits and their confidence level?

According to the descriptive analysis of this research question, the biology teachers’ challenges when implementing field trips are finding enough time for conducting field and organizing field trips and student safety. The limited time in an academic year may be a global problem for teachers when there are lots of requirements and students’ expected learning outcomes of running curriculum. Teachers may not have suitable time for implementing and/or planning field trips. For this reason, adding field trip activities may be a challenge for teachers (Anderson & Zhang, 2003). In addition, student safety may be a challenging factor for teachers because of the responsibility of them in management and student behavior during the field trips (Olson, Cox-Petersen, McComas, 2001). The reason of the significance of safety is based on the healthy arrival of students to their home (Nabors, Edwards, & Murray, 2009)

Moreover, benefits of field trips according to the biology teachers in this study are increasing students’ interest in science, taking pleasure from science and entertainment. These findings were in line with the literature which claimed field trips create personal and academic interest in science (Tal, 2001), entertaining and motivational learning (Bozdoğan, 2015) because of increased awareness, different classroom and real life settings.

Lastly for the confidence level of teachers, it can be claimed that the teachers feel confident about evaluating field trip effectiveness, relating the field trip to curriculum, and connecting students’ the field trip experience to classroom learning.

It can be concluded that the teachers were confident about the achievement of learning because they mostly focused on the curriculum. However, when they take into consideration the budget, time, preparation, administrative discourage and curriculum fit issues their confidence level may be lower as it was stated in later sections.

What is the relationship between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips and their year of teaching experience?

To address this research question the participant biology teachers were asked to state the year of experience in total and in their current school. Based on the experience the correlation analysis was conducted and Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for their attitudes on challenges and benefits of field trips and confidence level when implementing field trips.

For the challenges, most of the items did not correlate with the year of experience in current school. However, a statistically significant correlation was detected between the experience in current school and student safety. This means that when the teachers work at the same schools for long times they consider the student safety as a barrier for conducting field trips (Table 4). Then, the relationship between the total year of teaching and attitudes of teachers were examined. According to the findings there were significant relationships between the total year of experience in teaching profession and student safety and discourage of administration (Table 7).

Possibly, as the teachers get experienced in conducting field trips, they face with challenges about student safety. In 2001, the study of Olson, Cox-Petersen and McComas claimed that student behavior and safety were some of the inhibitors of conducting field trips according to pre-service and in-service teachers. With or without experience student safety by itself and because of problematic behaviors of students waited the teachers for conducting field trips. Moreover, another study added that (Nabors, Edwards, & Murray,2009) in case of any incident during field trips, providing equipment for safety such as antiseptics, antihistaminic creams and bandages was barrier for teachers.

After student safety issue, a relationship between the total year of teaching and administrative support was detected as a challenge. Experienced teachers agreed with that they were not supported by school authority. In his study, Bozdoğan (2015) claimed that field trips were challenging when the bureaucratic process lengthened with permissions, rules and other requirements. Due to this long bureaucratic process the school authorities may hesitate to support teachers about field trips (Table 7).

Furthermore, although no relationship was appointed between the year of teaching in current school and attitudes of teachers about benefits, total year of teaching correlated negatively with the importance of field trips for curriculum (Table 8). This relationship was supported as field trips were challenging when there was weak (Olson, Cox-Petersen, & McComas, 2001) and/or no curriculum fit (Anderson et. al, 2006; Anderson& Zhang, 2003).

In this research, no correlation was marked between the increasing year of experience both in current school and in profession and confidence levels of teachers when implementing field trips. Similarly, in 2016, Ateskan and Lane did not find any significant correlation between the teaching experience and confidence in field trip implementation.

What are the differences between biology teachers’ attitude towards field trips according to their level of education?

For providing an acceptable explanation for this research question, three groups were formed for educational levels of teachers; undergraduate, master and doctorate graduates. Firstly, for one dependent and one independent variable for three groups one-way ANOVA were found applicable in this study. However, the assumptions of normal distribution (Table 12) and homogeneity of variance (Table 13) assumptions were satisfied just for attitudes of teachers about field trip challenges. Based on these results one-way ANOVA (Table 14) analysis was implemented and results of this analysis indicated that the teachers with different educational backgrounds thought different about field trip challenges. To find out which groups had different opinions a post-hoc analysis was done. The undergraduate graduates agree with the challenges more than other groups.

Furthermore, for the other attitude items the teachers were examined for any difference by Kruskal Wallis nonparametric statistical analysis (Table 16).

According to the results of this analysis, these is no statistically significant difference between the teachers’ attitudes on field trips and their pre-service preparation who have different educational levels.

Based on the results of analysis of this research question, by targeted education, such as master and doctorate, the confidence level of teachers are high as expected to be (Wilson, Kickul, & Marlino, 2007). This may be ascribed to have a deeper understanding about education by conducting scientific studies during master and doctorate programs. However, the attitude all differences of teachers who have different educational backgrounds about field trips and pre-service education was not a sign for concluding that only undergraduate graduates were uncertain to conduct field trips because of many challenges. To illustrate, it was noted that master graduates of a teacher education program felt themselves inadequate for conducting field trips when they were asked about their confidence level (Ateskan& Lane, 2016) although they participated in field trip activities during pre-service education. They felt less confident about managing budget, arranging meals and transportation or building partnerships with non-formal educational sites. Not only having higher level of education may be a way to overcome the challenges but also taking proper training on organizing field trips.

Conclusions

Although the teachers have experiences, they still consider the safety is an issue because of student behaviors and lack of necessary support. The motivations of teachers towards profession may be increased because the experienced teacher can be expected to consider the benefits of field trips and to have higher In addition, learning the characteristics of students during the first semester may be a first step then structuring the field trip activities based on students’ needs may make teachers more comfortable during field trips which are organized in second semester or following semesters. By that way, the teachers may limit the misbehaviors of students to prevent any incidents and may promote better learning. A second step for the safety may be making arrangements of the safety materials, paramedic staff, number of companion teachers and pre-trip preparation more detailed.
Administrators may support the teachers for conducting field trips by proposing suitable and alternative time schedules and they may meet the requirements of long bureaucratic processes for teachers before starting to academic year. Furthermore, the policies in this area can be revised by keeping the safety issues important and some processes may be facilitated when obtaining permissions.
Fieldtrips can be both activators of student learning and inhibitors of running curriculum in an academic year. When the field trips are directly fit to the curriculum the teachers consider them beneficial for student learning and their own teaching on the other hand the field trips become challenges for relating to curriculum. Teachers should participate in training activities that has a purpose for connecting field trips to classroom lesson curriculum. As another alternative, curriculum developers should include the field trip ideas and suggestions related to students learning outcomes.
Public school teachers can be supported by local governmental authorities for sufficient time to plan and conduct field trips, for the materials needed during trips and transportation arrangements. In addition field trip activities and workshops may be provided. Moreover, the biology teachers in public schools can be interviewed especially for parental support about the To see whether public school parents cannot afford the field trip costs or directly do not support the field trip education. If these challenges are limited or eliminated the public school biology teachers implement field trips that may lead to increased confidence level.
Teacher education institutions may include the field trip planning, conducting and evaluating processes for making pre-service teachers ready for implementing field If these education programs structures the processes effectively they may show high confidence during in-service teaching. As a suggestion, organizing field trips with the involvement of high school students may make pre-service teachers more comfortable on field trips. Since, pre-service teachers may be experienced by doing real teaching and having responsibilities to manage student behaviors during field trips.
In case of transportation costs limit the teachers, parents and administrators, local field trips may be arranged. Besides, the students may be aware of their environment where they live and take part in place based education. Since, local communities may be a starting point to learn and teach classroom lessons not only for curricula of subjects but also for appreciation of local and global environment (Sobel, 2004).

Limitations

In this research the sample was not taken from the whole population thus the research is limited to the biology teachers in Rivers state, Nigeria. In addition, the sample size could have been larger to generalize the analysis into whole population.

Moreover, exploring the attitudes of biology teachers on field trips and their pre- service preparation may also be supported by additional interviews with the sample.

REFERENCES

Ajaja, O. P. (1998). An evaluation of differential effectiveness of Ausubel, Bruner and Karplus methods of teaching biology in Nigerian secondary schools. Unpublished Ph. D Thesis of University of Benin.
Anderson, D., & Zhang, Z. (2003). Teacher attitudes of field-trip planning and implementation. Visitor Studies Today, 6(3), 6-11.
Anderson, D., Kisiel, J., & Storksdieck, M. (2006). Understanding teachers’ perspectives on field trips: Discovering common ground in three countries. Curator: The Museum Journal, 49(3), 365-386.
Anderson, D., Lawson, B., & Mayer‐Smith, J. (2006). Investigating the impact of a practicum experience in an aquarium on pre‐service teachers. Teaching Education, 17(4), 341-353.
Ateşkan, A., & Lane, J. F. (2016). Promoting field trip confidence: teachers providing insights for pre-service education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 39(2), 190-201.
Ballantyne, R., & Packer, J. (2006). Promoting learning for sustainability: Principals’ attitudes of the role of outdoor and environmental education centres. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 22(1), 15-29.

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