%0 Journal Article
%T Students¡¯ Digital Photography Behaviors during a Multiday Environmental Science Field Trip and Their Recollections of Photographed Science Content
%A Victor R. Lee
%J Education Research International
%D 2014
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2014/736791
%X Taking photographs to document the experiences of an educational field trip is becoming a common activity for teachers and students alike. Considering the regular creation of photographic artifacts, our goal in this paper is to explore students¡¯ picture taking behavior and their recollections of science content associated with their photographs. In this study, we partnered with a class of fifth-grade students in the United States and provided each student with a digital camera to document their experiences during an environmental science field trip at a national park. We report the frequency of photography behaviors according to which activities were most often documented by the students and specifically that students tended to document more of their experiences when they were in outdoor, natural spaces rather than inside of visitor centers or museums. Also, through an analysis of students¡¯ comments about the science content captured in their photographs we observe that students¡¯ comments about photographs of the outdoors tended to show greater depth and complexity than those that were taken in indoor, museum-like spaces. 1. Introduction Field trips are an important vehicle through which classrooms of students and teachers are able to engage with and learn about the natural world through integrated processes of immersion and direct observation [1, 2]. They are noteworthy for educators because they may lead to improved content understanding of and attitudes relevant to the natural environment [3, 4] and also because they can produce long-term memories of specific learning experiences that have the potential of enduring for several years [5¨C7]. In the literature related to recall of field experiences, these memories are often identified and treated as strictly mental phenomena. That is, memory is often conceptualized, sometimes tacitly, as a recapitulation of information stored in a mental encoding. However, it is also worth recognizing that memory, as well as many other cognitive processes, can alternately be seen as not only a mental phenomenon but also a material one [8]. Various artifacts or creations from an experience can serve a central role in the act of ¡°remembering,¡± and it is through these creations that we piece together recollections of lived experiences. In this study, we take the idea of photographs as a form of externalized memory seriously and consider what is captured during an environmental science field trip experience using this medium. The capture of photographic records on field trips has been noted as an activity largely undertaken
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/edri/2014/736791/