The Role of Overseas Field Courses in Student Learning in the Biosciences

Abstract

Field courses provide excellent opportunities to engage students with their subject. Previous research has confirmed the considerable academic and pastoral benefits gained from taking students out of the classroom, especially in Biosciences and related disciplines. Here, we compare student attendance/attainment on a Level 5 Biosciences field course to South Africa to: (1) attainment on other Level 5 modules; (2) attainment at Level 6; (3) dissertation performance; and (4) grade trajectory between Level 5 and Level 6 for two successive cohorts. Students who attended the overseas field course tended to attain higher dissertation marks than non-attending peers and had a better grade trajectory, being more likely to improve their degree classification between Levels 5 and 6. We discuss possible (non-mutually-exclusive) reasons for this, including academic experience, undertaking challenging assessment at the end of Level 5 based on independent research (essentially a mini-dissertation), piquing students’ enthusiasm, or simply that field trips attract students motivated to improve academic performance. Given the limited specific consideration of running field courses in unfamiliar environments (e.g. overseas) in Higher Education, we also discuss the potential additional benefits afforded by geographical novelty, considering: (1) student experience and enjoyment; and (2) student perceptions of learning. We found that, with appropriate preparation, running field courses in unfamiliar locations can add to the general benefits of fieldwork for student learning. Our findings do not support previous work suggesting that students can be disadvantaged by novelty, concluding instead that the novelty of the environment, and the new experiences thereby afforded, were positive.

Keywords:

• Fieldwork
• student experience
• attainment
• grade trajectory

Acknowledgements

This research was inspired by a previous HEA-funded Departmental Teaching Enhancement Scheme project ‘African Biosciences Videos: Developing a supportive framework for field courses through video-based resources’ to AEG and AGH in 2010/2011, which was match funded by the Dame Janet Trotter Trust. The authors gratefully acknowledge these initial funding sources, as well as the detailed and insightful comments of two anonymous reviews on an earlier version of this paper that substantially improved the final paper.