Biology student teachers’ interest and self-efficacy in planning and conducting field trips after participation in a university course

Recent studies indicate that student biology teachers hold concerns regarding field trips. Therefore, allowing student biology teachers to gain experiences in planning and conducting field trips during their university education could be one way to make them aware of the potential of field trips and to increase their self-efficacy expectations. This study was carried out in a field trip-oriented course at the University of Münster (Germany) during the summer terms of the years 2017 to 2019. Using a pretest-posttest design, we measured 50 biology student teachers’ interest and self-efficacy concerning the organization and implementation of field trips. The results showed that students already exhibited a high level of interest but a lower level of self-efficacy regarding field trips in the pretest. After the course, however, significant differences emerged, with self-efficacy showing the largest improvement and interaction effects between time of measurement and gender. A follow-up test revealed that this was a sustained and long-lasting effect. These findings suggest that field trip-oriented courses such as the one considered here may increase the cognitive-affective parameters of interest and self-efficacy expectations among prospective biology teachers. In times of eroding species knowledge and a general alienation from nature, these findings might increase the probability of teachers actually conducting field trips to complement biology lessons.