In an effort to increase students’ abilities to understand complex scientific concepts and to apply their understanding to investigate real-world problems, inquiry-based learning has become widely recognized and is a fundamental part of science education. The purpose of this site-based program was to involve science teachers directly in sea turtle research, rehabilitation, and conservation through placed-based education. The program was conducted through a university masters-level summer course at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center (GSTC) on historic Jekyll Island, Georgia. Funding was provided by a Teacher Quality Grant, formerly the Eisenhower Science and Mathematics Grants, while the project was in operation for four years. A one group pretest-posttest design was implemented in order to answer the research question: 1) What impact does a placed-based experience have on science teachers’ content knowledge of sea turtle conservation. The results from a paired samples t test showed there was a statistically significant difference between the content pretest and the content posttest. The implications suggest that the linkage between placed-based learning in science is of considerable importance for science programs.

Author: Lina Soares

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2021)

• Date of Conference: 22-24 November 2021
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2021.0025
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-42-6
• Conference Location: Virtual (London, UK)