2024/04/03 by Jean-Philippe Ayotte-Beaudet, Jean‐Philippe Ayotte‐Beaudet, Abdelkrim Hasni +7
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · Psychology · #Diverse Educational Innovations Studies #Environmental Education and Sustainability #Outdoor and Experiential Education
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00219266.2024.2332741
crossref issued 2024/04/03 · crossref published 2024/04/03 · crossref published-online 2024/04/03 · openalex publication_date 2024/04/03 · crossref created 2024/04/03 · crossref published-print 2025/03/15 · crossref deposited 2025/04/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Our research objective was to investigate whether a place-based educational intervention for elementary school students leads to a better ability to make unsolicited observations about living organisms. We tested the following prediction: Elementary school students who learn about living organisms outdoors in a familiar environment will be able to make more unsolicited observations about living organisms one week after the end of the intervention compared to those two months after the intervention ends. Our study was conducted in the province of Québec, Canada, which resulted in 116 students experiencing the same educational intervention from home. Based on individual telephone interviews, we compared elementary school students’ ability to make unsolicited observations about living organisms one week (Group A, n = 58) and two months (Group B, n = 58) after a place-based educational intervention in their home environment. We developed three emergent categories to analyse students’ place-based unsolicited observations about living organisms. We found that elementary school students who learned about living organisms in their home environment made more unsolicited observations about living organisms leading to factual descriptions two months after the end of the learning experience than those who were interviewed one week after the intervention.