What Do We Know About Geoscience Teaching and Learning in the Field?

Geoscience learning in outdoor, field-based settings can provide students with a deep understanding of the core practices of geoscientists. Although field-based learning has been studied at different educational levels, most research has been at the tertiary level, and few studies have considered field learning progressions across grade levels. This research is a synthesis of our team's decade of research on field experiences of students and preservice teachers. The goal was to identify the characteristics of successful field learning to determine how educators can support learners of different ages as they progress into and through tertiary education. Students ages 10-25 participated in environmental geoscience experiences of varyng types, including geocaching, field photography, citizen science, community-engaged research, and field excursions. The findings support the conclusions of other researchers that observation, data collection, and analysis are appropriate for primary grade levels, but primary level teachers need experience in the field, ideally during their training, to gain confidence taking their own students into the field. For primary education, after a training program with scientists, teachers were comfortable adopting field photography as a method to increase student observational skills. Further, primary and secondary students were able to complete research projects on geoscience hazards that required generating a hypothesis, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting their interpretations to a public audience. This synthesis both confirms the importance of field-based learning in sparking student interest in science and provides insights on how the geoscience community can support teachers to design effective field learning.