School field trips: Assessing their long-term impact

Museums invest considerable resources in promoting and supporting elementary-school field trips, but remain skeptical about their educational value. Recent cognitive psychology and neuroscience research require a reappraisal of how and what to assess relative to school-field-trip learning. One hundred and twenty-eight subjects were interviewed about their recollections of school field trips taken during the early years of their school education: 34 fourth-grade students, 48 eighth-grade students, and 46 adults composed the group. Overall, 96% of all subjects could recall a school field trip. The vast majority recalled when they went, with whom they went, where they went, and three or more specific aspects of what they did. Most said that they had thought about their field-trip experience subsequently, nearly three-quarters said they thought about it frequently. Reinforced by this study were the strong interrelationships between cognition, affect, the physical context and social context. Even after many years, nearly 100% of the individuals interviewed could recall one or more things learned on the trip, the majority of which related to content/subject matter.