Abstract:
This research investigated the effects of fieldwork on the achievements and attitudes of secondary school students in environmental education in Kogi State. Fieldwork is a supervised learning that takes place outside the classroom. The study was hinged on the theory of learning by insight propounded by Kohler which emphasizes learner’s centeredness and activity based learning atmosphere. The study considered interactions of gender and location on the achievements and attitudes of secondary school students exposed to fieldwork in Environmental Education (EE). The study was guided by seven research questions and six hypotheses. The pretest posttest non-equivalent group design was used in the study. A sample of 225 senior secondary school (SS II) students who were offering geography was drawn through stratified random sampling. Two instruments: Geography Achievement Test (GAT) and Geography Attitude Measurement Scale (GAMS) were designed to collect data from students. The instruments were face validated by three experts from Science Education Department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and three senior secondary school geography teachers. The estimate of internal consistency of GAT was .96 using Kuder-Richardson formular 20 while that of GAMS was .83 using Cronbach’s Alpha. The seven research questions were answered using means and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) at 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that fieldwork has significant effects on the achievements and attitudes of secondary school students. It was also discovered that there was no interaction effect between gender and location on achievement of students in EE but there is interaction effect between gender and location on attitude of secondary school students in EE due to fieldwork. It was recommended that school managements should ensure that students must undertake fieldwork at least once every term.
