Volume : 8, Issue : 1, JAN 2022

IMPACT OF BIRD WATCHING ON LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

DR. VAREISHANG TANGPU

Abstract

Bird watching is one activity where students learn our environment. The various activities of bird watching contribute to improving the biological knowledge on birds. A number of environmental concerns can be easily learned by students through such activities. The contribution level of bird watching activities on student knowledge is investigated in this study. Batches of students during a period of three years consisting of 477 students of B.Sc. B.Ed, B.A. B.Ed and M.Sc. Ed of RIE, Mysuru were divided to almost equally three groups. Group I received only classroom discourse; group II joined only bird watching under the guidance of an expert and group III received classroom course along with bird watching activities. The various environmental concerns were explained with examples in both the discourses. The students took a test related to 10 environmental concerns before and after discourses. The test was evaluated for 10 points; each carrying one point. The students of group III who joined both the discourses have highest achievement (73.52%) while the average test scores of the other two groups were 42.52% and 45.00% respectively.

The present study shows that bird watching activities have positive impact on learning our environment. Moreover, only bird watching activities show more effective result than only classroom discourses according to the study results. In conclusion, the outdoor educational activities such as bird watching can be effective way of learning about the environment.

Keywords

BIRDWATCHING, OUTDOOR LEARNING, ENVIRONMENT, RIE CAMPUS.

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