A School Field Trip to Futian Mangrove Nature Reserve.
Photo credit: Mangrove Foundation (MCF) of Shenzhen.
Note: Individuals identifiable in this photo have granted consent for its usage.

By Meng Wu, Weizhe Zhang, Zhuo Zeng, Chi-Chang Liu, and Kuei-Pin Liu.

Read the full paper here.

China is encouraging nature-based school field trips through its national and local policies. However, on-site administrators and teachers of formal schools in China’s highly exam-oriented education system may have mixed feelings about this educational approach, due to their doubt about its effectiveness for students’ knowledge acquisition and their hesitation to refer to successful cases from English-speaking organizations. As a response to the doubt and hesitation, our research aimed to assess the impact of a half-day field trip to Futian Mangrove Nature Reserve on 3rd-grade students’ mental models of the mangrove ecosystem in Shenzhen, China.

Mental models are conceptualized knowledge that positively correlates with environmental attitudes and behaviors. If nature-based school field trips improve students’ mental models, this can help us address both the need of formal schools to increase students’ knowledge and the aspiration of environmental organizations to promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

To evaluate changes in mental models, we used students’ pre- and post-drawings of Futian Mangrove Nature Reserve. We analyzed and scored them through a rubric developed based on grounded theory coding procedures. The statistical analysis of the score changes between pre- and post-drawings indicated a significant increase in the participants’ mental models about the whole mangrove ecosystem and each of its components. Meanwhile, our qualitative analysis found that the participants could be divided into three levels based on their pre-drawing scores, and that all three levels of the participants improved their knowledge about the mangrove ecosystem during the trip.

Our results demonstrate that nature-based school field trips can facilitate pupils’ knowledge acquisition. We hope that our research can eliminate the misconception that nature-based school field trips are merely fun journeys and useless for knowledge gain and encourage formal schools in the exam-oriented educational context of China to utilize it as a justification and vicarious experience to participate in or implement such trips for their students.