Enhancement of Student Values, Interests and Attitudes in Earth Science Through a Field-Oriented Approach

A low motivational climate is characteristic of many introductory, general-education science courses at the university level. It has been well established that student motivation in a learning experience is, in large part, determined by the affective responses of the students to that experience. To measure the effect of field activities on the affective responses of students in this study, very different approaches were used by the same instructor in teaching two sections of earth science laboratory. One section was conducted in the traditional manner. It involved primarily classroom activities utilizing a laboratory manual. A field-oriented, on-site approach was employed for the second section. The content was virtually identical in the two sections. Both classes were pretested for values (sense of importance), attitudes (sense of enjoyment), and interests as related to the thirty major topics or themes of the course. These tests indicated that there were no significant differences between the two classe...