The effect and impact of field trip on students of history
Background To The Study
Before the coming of formal education, the indigenous system of education was based on practices or field study in Cameroon that was the pre-colonial era (1844-1884). Here the issues of peer were little or less occurring as the young adult learned only from the elderly were knowledge, experience and attitude were mostly transferred from the old to the young. The coming of the missionaries in Cameroon gives the birth of formal education which the first school was created in Bimbia by Joseph Merrick in 1884. During the colonial period, Cameroon was introducing to the formal system of education whereby children, young adult, where taught in the same setting and taken out for fieldwork or experienced what was taught in the classroom. This encouraging peer interaction as the learner forms click in their respective group.
Fieldtrip is activity-based learning which offers the opportunity for learners to get firsthand information on people, places and things in order to concretize their learning experience. It has been observed in most Cameroon schools such as the secondary, high schools and universities, that teachers depend extensively on field trip method of learning which has gone a long way to improve students’ academic performance in both external and internal examinations. Fieldtrip strategy is a method of teaching which helps to bring about effective learning of geography. Students are being exposed to interesting learning location which turns to increase their understanding during learning. The social infrastructure such as Libraries, Laboratories, Museum, and Recreational parks, Zoos, Mountains and transports also play an important role to students learning when they go out for field trip to some of these places.
According to Instructional Strategies Online (2013), study taken outside the classroom do obtain direct experience from the natural setting and equally improves student’s interest in learning. This help in collecting data, material or objects as well as observe objects or phenomena not possible to bring in the classroom. During field trip, the entire class visits a point of instructional interest such as Museum, Factory, Hill Mountains, Inselbergs Valleys, River Side etc. According to Duvall and Krepel (1981), a field trip is an outdoor, fieldwork, or learning exercise undertaken by the teacher and the students in a certain aspect of subject particularly in geography so as to give the students the opportunity to acquire knowledge. It is a trip arranged by the school and undertaken for educational purpose in which the students go to places where the concepts for instruction may be observed and studied directly in their functional setting.
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