THE FUTURE OF FIELDWORK: IT'S NOT JUST THE COGNITIVE DOMAIN

Fieldwork in higher education is under pressure from a wide range of threats, such as: time; costs; health & safety; land access; fear of litigation; displacement of research activity; perception it can be replaced by virtual environments. In addition, academic staff who are lab-based or theory-based (and administrators) will often question the need for field-based work on the basis that the same cognitive domain goals can be achieved without going into the field; thus without incurring the higher costs in time and funding.

In this presentation, I argue that the value of field work is not just in the cognitive domain, which many academics are now familiar with through the widely used Bloom's Taxonomy for the cognitive domain. The US-based committee of examiners (formed after a 1948 convention) that ultimately produced Bloom's Taxonomy for the cognitive domain, identified two other, much less well known, learning domains: the affective domain concerning feelings, emotions and attitudes, and the psychomotor domain concerning manual skills and behaviours. Fieldwork is ideally placed to develop the affective and psychomotor domains in parallel with the cognitive domain. This will be illustrated by a summary of some research that investigated the effectiveness of residential field courses in geography, earth science and environmental science courses at 7 UK institutions of higher education by focusing on the effects of fieldwork in the affective domain. Approximately 360 students were surveyed immediately before and after residential field classes, enabling analysis of changes in responses resulting from the field experience. The research found that fieldwork led to significant effects in the affective domain. In general, student affective responses were positive prior to fieldwork and became more positive as a result of the field experience. Some sub-groups recorded higher levels of anxiety prior to the fieldwork; but these differences were mitigated by the field experience. Fieldwork has a positive effect on students' feelings and attitudes towards their subject and this affective response is perhaps one of the prime reasons why students in general learn better in the field than in the class room (e.g. Kern & Carpenter 1986, JGE; Fuller et al. 2006, JGHE; Elkins & Elkins 2007, JGE).