Field trips are visits to an out-of-school setting designed for educational and academic purposes whereby as a result students gain firsthand knowledge and experiences. Historically, it was the potential for student learning that motivated teachers to utilize field trips. However, there is reasonable suspicion among scholars today that teachers are utilizing field trips less since the start of the new millennia; the common reasons being cited among others include a slumping economy, an increase in accountability due to high-stakes testing, and rising fuel costs. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence that can confirm or deny this suspicion. Therefore, the purpose of this survey research study is twofold. The first goal is to investigate what proportion of Florida K-12 public school teachers, within the field of social studies, science, mathematics, and language arts utilized a field trip during the 2012-13 academic school year; along with investigating the total number and frequency in which they used those field trips. The second goal is to identify if there were any significant differences in the number of field trips that those teachers utilized based on four independent variables (a) the grade level at which the teachers teach, (b) teachers' years of teaching experience, (c) the content focus of the field trips, and (d) whether teachers graduated from a teacher preparation program or not. The study utilized a non-experimental causal-comparative research design to conclude that there were some significant differences in the number of field trips teachers utilized as a result of two of the independent variables.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-5724 |
| Date | 01 January 2014 |
| Creators | Kenna, Joshua |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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