What Contribution Can Residential Field Courses Make to the Education of 11-14 Year-olds?

General feedback from the students

Three hundred and ten before questionnaires were received from 11 groups
and 203 after questionnaires from 11 groups. Only 8 of the 13 groups returned
both before and after questionnaires. Many students did not complete all the
open response questions in either the before or after questionnaire and a very
small number of students ticked only one column for almost every question.
Information has been aggregated to describe the overall findings as no school
managed to provide complete sets of data for every student.

A t-test comparison was applied to each of the closed questions, for females
and males separately, to ascertain whether the courses had significant
impacts on their attitudes towards science, geography, PE and so on. Most of
the values of t revealed no significant difference. Only one of the comparisons
for boys and five for girls have before and after means that differ significantly
at the p < 0.05 level (i.e. there is at most a one in twenty probability that the
difference could be due to chance). The overall shortage of significant
changes may be due to the fact that the mean scores before the students
participated in the courses revealed that they already felt generally positive
about their abilities and generally confident about the trip.

On one course, girls felt more confident about participating in group work after
the course, realising that listening skills are more important than they had
previously thought. On another course, girls felt that they had become more
effective members of a team in sports and were more confident in new places
but felt that listening well was less important than they had previously thought.
On one course, the boys actually said after the course that they enjoyed
geography less than before but this may have been due to their not
appreciating the connection between school subjects and the eco-activities at
the centre. The girls on one course, however, now felt more confident in new
places.

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