Seeing the trees: what urban middle school students notice about the street trees that surround them

ABSTRACT

Even highly urban environments are settings for outdoor learning of local biodiversity, for they contain easily accessible street tree diversity that students walk pass daily. This study uses pre/post assessments and a tree observation curriculum grounded in scientific observation practice to understand the everyday and scientific tree observation practice of urban middle school students of mixed socioeconomic status (SES). Specifically, it examined students’ abilities to name trees, the specific features of trees students noticed, and the botanical vocabulary they used to describe the trees they pass daily. Participants included 308 intervention students and 265 comparison students (11–14 years old) in six public New York City middle schools. Findings show that without the intervention students could not identify common street trees (oak, maple, honey locust), that they did not notice key tree features like leaf arrangement and shape and that they lacked the botanical vocabulary to accurately describe the features of the trees they see daily. Instead, students mostly differentiated trees by obvious uninformative gross features like overall tree size. Generalised multilevel statistical models of pre/post test results show that the ability to name, notice, and describe trees with botanical terminology improved with the study intervention. Students from medium SES schools had more prior knowledge and showed greater growth in learning than students from low SES schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Plant Identification
• biodiversity
• naming
• botany
• student learning

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank J. Koch for help with testing and designing the curriculum; Craig Douglas for making assessment, curricular drawings, and paper figures; pilot and field-testing teachers who provided feedback and used the curriculum in their classrooms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DRL-1221188). Any views are those of the authors and not the NSF