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The Kingdom of Bhutan’s development philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH) emphasises the need to balance sustainable economic growth with environmental conservation, promotion of cultural heritage, and good governance. In consonance, Bhutan’s Constitution entrusts every citizen with the sacred task of protecting the natural environment and preventing all forms of ecological degradation. Moreover, given the increasing global crisis of degrading the earth, climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction, the urgency of nature conservation in school education cannot be ignored. The need to articulate clearly how nature conservation education should be promoted in Bhutanese primary schools is, therefore, becoming increasingly urgent.
While some elements of nature conservation education are included in the school curriculum, not much is known about educator perceptions, school curricula, teaching and learning processes, and the role of school concerning nature conservation. Hence, this empirical study was necessary and timely to understand how nature conservation was perceived, taught and practised in Bhutanese primary schools. Social constructivism with an ethnographical research design was employed for this study. Relying on participant observation techniques for data collection, perspectives of 15 educators and 105 students of four Bhutanese primary schools were gathered. Three data collection tools, namely, a semi-structured interview, an open-ended questionnaire and field notes were used.
The study brought out a number of significant findings. Although Bhutan’s unique features, such as being heavily forested, traditional farming practices and spiritual practices, are advantageous to nature conservation education, gaps and inconsistencies were seen in the school curriculum and practices. Firstly, the educators and students who participated in the study misunderstood nature conservation as environmental conservation. Secondly, the curriculum textbooks on nature conservation generally represent Western perspectives of nature conservation rather than the Bhutanese spiritual and cultural beliefs that are primarily influenced by Buddhism. Findings also showed that children in the four primary schools had limited opportunities for direct experiences with nature during their lessons on nature. Lastly, the role of schools in nature conservation education lacks clarity.
The findings from this study have direct implications for the Ministry of Education, teacher education colleges, and other primary education stakeholders in the country. Several strategies are suggested to address the gaps identified. These include professional development programmes for teachers to enhance their knowledge about nature conservation education. The next strategy is reviewing the science and social studies curriculum to integrate the Buddhist values of interdependence and harmonious living with nature. The study also flagged the need to create rich natural environments on school campus, including using the community forests for children to play, study and develop connection with nature. Lastly, the study recommends developing reading materials for children on themes of nature.
Mozambique is among the poorest countries in the world in such a way that many schools lack essential resources (electricity, chairs, internet, computers, water, and others). As a result, the traditional model is still the most used one in subjects related to programming in different courses where the teacher presents new content during face-to-face sessions and students take assignments and exercises to complete at home. This subject is still new for many students, so, they find it challenging to complete the tasks at home. Furthermore, programming is taught only at the university level, so, students find it difficult to understand it for the first time, resulting in a motivation decrease as well as the increase of drawbacks in programming subjects. In this way, methods like the cognitive apprenticeship model (Collins, Brown, Newman, 1989), extreme programming (Beck & Fowler, 2001), gamification (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011), and flipped classroom (Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000) could be used or combined to motivate students and overcome these challenges. Since programming consists of a set of sequential steps and procedures, Gamified Flipped Classroom (GFC) seemed to be an appropriate method as it could be easy to demonstrate the “how to” procedures to students, letting them work on them at home (video lectures, links, documents). The teacher would act as a guide and facilitator for both home and in-class sessions, supported by gamification elements. Nevertheless, the thesis aimed to design a GFC learning environment adapted to the Mozambican context, investigate the student’s perception regarding this combination and analyse motivation and learning outcomes regarding day and night shifts. The research was conducted through Design-Based Research (DBR) for the learning environment design as well as student perception analysis and through a quasi-experiment for motivation and learning outcomes processing. The results indicate that The GFC learning environment for the Mozambique context should rely on three core aspects: A low-cost approach, availability of institution facilities and a proper curriculum plan adaptation. Furthermore, student’s perceptions were mostly positive, despite the occurrence of some negative ones related to connectivity problems. Lastly, generic data indicates that GFC did not significantly impact students’ motivation, however, separate analysis indicates that students from the day shift tended to feel more motivated than the day shift ones. Results also indicated that both shifts tended to increase their sense of competence and interest/enjoyment during the GFC learning environment but their sense of pressure was almost the same. Regarding learning outcomes, students scored higher marks during the traditional learning environment than in GFC, nevertheless, day-shift tended to have higher scores than night ones. So, it can be concluded that students from the day-shift felt more motivated and had better outcomes than the night ones.
The present thesis served as a starting point for promoting a change of paradigm in teaching programming, especially in countries with limited access to technology like Mozambique by adapting methods like GFC to its context.
Mobile Technology Impact In Support Note-Taking And Sharing Activities During Biology Field Trips
(2024)
This research study is to explore methods for incorporating mobile technology into field trips to support note-taking activities.
It presents the result of a qualitative study to determine the methods and tools biology students use to take and share notes on field trips and to develop useful guidelines for the development of mobile technologies to support note-taking and sharing activities. A field note is a combination of raw data and ideas that represents the process of transforming an observed interaction into a written one.
The study design consisted of two research phases:
Phase 1: Observation of 14 undergraduate Biology students attending the Marin ecology field study trip at the Technical university of Kaiserslautern, and 14 undergraduate biology students also how took part in the Botany Biodiversity field trip at the Saarland university.
Phase 2: Interview with 13 undergraduate biology students who took part in the Marin Molecular biology field trip and 14 undergraduate biology students who took part in the Botany biodiversity field trip.
The results of this research provided an understanding of generic requirements (and context-specific requirements) by identification of the undergraduate biology students' needs and requirements during field trip learning activities, i.e., it was observed that all groups of students take a number of devices with them, these include a mixture of traditional and modern tools such as note and sketchbooks for note taking. Also, it was identified what makes mobile technology useful to use in the field, to support the outdoor students learning experience i.e. the system must provide a GPS link function to link the taken notes with location automatically. Also, from the other side this research study explored factors that affect the use of mobile technology in biology field trips by university students can lead them to choose paper-based tools to support their learning experiences during fieldwork.
In general, Mobile technology have a great impact on the students in collecting data and capturing their learning experiences during the field trip.
Technologies based on Geographic Information System (GIS) are widely used in society and are increasingly being integrated into school curricula and practice. Many claims have been made that the use of GIS in class has positive effects on a wide range of achievement and affective variables. However, empirical evidence for that, especially in the German situation, has been scarce.
Systemic thinking has been central to the guiding objective of German geography education for many years and constitutes an important contribution to prepare students for life in a complex world. Yet, so far, specific test instruments and studies elucidating factors that help students improve this competency have been far from extensive.
This dissertation aims at exploring the influence of a short ‘working with GIS’ vs. ‘working with maps’ unit on students’ achievement in geography, specifically, the systemic thinking competency. Based on literature a definition of geographic systemic thinking and an associated competency model were developed. In total, three one test time and two pre-/posttest with control group studies were conducted to develop test instruments and a treatment as well as to study the question at hand. The treatment used the topic ‘tourism in Kenya’. Partly Desktop-, partly Web-based GIS versions were used. In study 5, there were two different types of materials, which contained parallel contents/tasks. While one used an overview sheet of relevant GIS functionality (‘old’), the other integrated more step-by-step instruction directly into the text (‘new’). Variables included were systemic thinking, sex, age, stream/type of geography study/pre-score, grade/semester, language and migration background, pre-experience, affective variables, pre-basic spatial thinking skills, treatment and material type. Not all variables were used in every study.
The largest study (study 5) used the results of 932 seventh grade students for analyses. The sample contains both high and middle stream students from three German federal states. The study highlights issues such as e.g. test time constraints, open task coding, partly ceiling effects and item difficulties partly deviant from the model expectations. For the analyses, both raw average scores and WLE estimates obtained by a Rasch analysis are used. Additionally, based on the WLE scores, HLMs are calculated.
Overall, in study 5 GIS students do not improve pre- to posttest in systemic thinking. Consequently, GIS has no positive, and partly a significantly negative impact compared to maps, e.g. in a HLM with all other variables having significant effects included. Results for material type are mixed. For instance, on the one hand, t-tests show no significant difference in pre-posttest-change between students working with ‘old’ and ‘new’ WebGIS materials. On the other
hand, the overall HLMs with other variables included show a significant negative effect only for the ‘old’ but not for the ‘new’ WebGIS materials.
Only 23 students could be included in the ‘having already worked with an educational GIS’-sub-group (vs. 520). The improvement of these students pre- to posttest is not significant, but has an effect size above 0.2. A calculation with the ‘no pre-experience’ sub-group being reduced to students with similar characteristics (e.g. in terms of stream, GIS type) leads to 19 vs. 84 students and similar results. In both cases, students with pre-experience perform not significantly, but with an effect size above 0.2, better than students without pre-experience. Overall, the results could hint at students needing more pre-experience so as to not have so much mental capacity tied to getting used to the software and being able to concentrate more on the system interrelationships. However, due to the sample characteristics and study design, this cannot be proven by the present data and thus needs to be explored in further studies.
Other variables (age, sex, migration and language background, stream, pre-score, pre-spatial thinking score) show mixed results depending on the analysis method used. This underlines the impact of methodological choices and the need for large sample studies in order to be able to take a closer look at individual sub-groups. Furthermore, the HLM results point to not all influencing variables having been included. In general, the impact of variables such as pre-achievement/ stream and sex on pre-posttest change evident in some of the analyses points to the need for more research to develop differentiated learning materials.
The conducted studies also show, e.g. through deviations from the assumed model of systemic thinking, that there is still a great need for more studies in terms of test- and model development for systemic and spatial thinking in a geographic context.