NAGT's newsletter, "In the Trences" (January 2019, Vol 9(1) ) has a few articles on field trips in geoscience education.
Tarin Weiss from Westfield State University starts off by noting that field trips are common in college geoscience, and that during the recession K--12 field trips had a big drop off (around a third) from normal. So there's instantly a rationale for having trips in the first place ("colleges do it") and a rationale for promoting them ("schools are willing to cut them easily'). Interestingly schools not only eliminated field trips, but then replaced them with test prep activities. THat sounds like there's more than just a cost consideration going on, if it was just the cost of field trips then the schools might replace trips with normal classroom time. Perhaps test prep is just taking everything over whenever it gets the oppurtunity.
They're advocating for college geoscience instructors to in effect curate field trip sites and activities and then go out to the schools to recruit teachers to have their classes particpate in the trips. Trips can be field locations or museums. To that end they place field trips with the concept of place based education and the Next Generation Science Standards.
They also note a few times that field trips need to be accessible for students with different physical abilities, and suggest that virutal trips and/or activieis in more accessible parts of a park/location have to be considered.
As for the point of the field trip, they not that students should be, like researchers in the field, observing new things that become a problemt to be solved. So this impllies needing a preceding framework that the new observation creates a problem with. They go on to not that there need to be pre-trip and post-trip activities to frame questions and get this framework.
They recommend three to four learning goals within a trip and conclude that the purpose of a field trip is to construct explanations about the natural world, so again an explanation is a thing that deals with a problem for a given framework.
Among the citations is a reference to a study on NYC schools using Museums like the AMNH for field trips, and how that correlates with test scores; Whitesell 2015, "A Day at the Museum: The Impact of Field Trips to Informal Science Education Instutions on MIddle School Science Achievement", NYU's Institute for Education and Social Policy Working paper #03-15. This worker looked at six years worth of student data at 200 schools. Their main positive result is a broad statistically significant ~1% increased likeliehood of science exam proficiency. Apparently there hasn't been all that much quantitative and large sample work done on relating the number of science field trips to test scores.
Along the lines of virtual field trips, this issue has an article showing how students build up 3D immersive trips and locations from Frank Granshaw at Portland State. Making the VR site itself is a project, but then the completed site can be used by incomming students to prepare for field activities. They refer ot the product as a Virtual Field Experience (VFE).
The popularity of VR/Augmented reality at the consumer level has made it a little easier to accomlish this, education lags industry. This despite the large amount of educational interst in VR and the use of VR for even UNESCO meetings.
The author primarily discusses Holobuilder, which uses the Ricoh Theta panoramic camera. Holobuilder is apparently a construction/real estate focused company that uses these cameras, sometimes left in place/streaming, to document site construction. Projects at the PDX campus include the creation of VFE for a biology/geology community college field course at a trail along an estuary; fir undergrads in a sustainability and climate courses creating VFEs of urban farms; Middle School students doing a summer science camp on a section of a stream, including micro-photographs of collected diatoms (including SEM photos); and virtual tours of monitoring sites.
Immediately a lot of this fits right into our capabilities; SEM, civic engagement; site monitoring; urban farms. Many of their products are 360 panoramas at trail waypoints, linked to a GIS map, where you can clicked markers to move between waypoint, and while at a point clink on floating links to get more information, like this one in Germany. The interaction for a user than can be through a webbrowser on a site hosted by the college. Holobuilder is what allows them to do that--- integrating with GIS, putting up clickable data, or even splitting the screen to show the location at different dates---very easily.
Some of the VFEs are more involved that others, this one not only shows a view, but is linked up more detailed notes/instruction, and allows measurements, including using a 'virtual clinometer'.
They do caution that when they started doing VFE's in 2013, there was a large amoung of instructor work required; students would collect photos and panormas and 360sphere photos, but the instructor would end up having to stitch sites together out of the field. But now in 2019 using Holosuite's plans, the site assembly can take place entirely in the field.
