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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 16, Issue 1, Article 12 (Jun., 2015) |
In general, including tests time, the physical flood walk took about 1.5 hours, and it was around 50 minutes for the Web-based flood walk. Therefore, it saved about half of the time in conducting a Web-based flood walk to convey risk knowledge. How about the learning outcome? In the following section, the results are presented.
Awareness, experience of and willingness to learn about flood problems
Concerning the pre-assessment of awareness, experience of and willingness to learn about flood problems (Table 2), it was shown that, to a high degree (over 4 out of a 7-point scale), the pupils from groups A and B were aware of flood problems and had recognized flood problems are important to learn, even though they might not have experiences of flood problems in life. However, it was disclosed that the physical walk group of pupils showed significant difference concerning the awareness and experience of flood problems. The correlation of pupils’ awareness and experiences was not investigated in depth in this study, but it has been considered in our following projects.
Table 2. Pre-assessment of awareness, experience and willingness to learn (* with significant difference, p<0.05).
The scale is from 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly).
Physical walk
Web-based walk
P value
(p<0.05)
I am aware of flood problems
5.2
4.1
0.004*
I have experience of flood problems
3.5
1.8
0.000*
I find it important to learn about flood problems
5.6
5.8
0.697
Mean score
4.8
3.9
The flood knowledge
In terms of the open questions about the flood knowledge (Table 3), a clear improvement was seen from pre- to post-test for both groups of flood walk activities. Even though, the Web-based flood walk group had higher score on flood causes knowledge with a significant difference (p<0.05), understandings have improved for both groups of pupils.
Concerning the understanding of flood consequences after the flood walk, the group of the Web-based flood walk showed a better improvement with a significant difference (p<0.05) than the physical flood walk group.
Table 3. Open questions about deeper flood knowledge (* with significant difference, p<0.05).
The scale is from 1 (low knowledge) to 5 (high knowledge).
Before walk
After walk
Physical walk
Web-based walk
P value
(p<0.05)
Physical walk
Web-based walk
P value
(p<0.05)
Flood causes
1.9
2.4
0.021*
2.9
3.3
0.125
Flood consequences
2.1
2.0
0.150
2.2
2.6
0.009*
Possibilities to prevent flood problems
1.9
1.1
0.606
2.8
2.6
0.309
Mean score
1.9
1.8
2.6
2.8
In addition to the open-ended questions, during the flood walk activities, we had embedded six multiple-choice questions to evaluate the pupils’ understanding of flood related knowledge after stop 2 and 5. These stops are corresponded to objectives 1-3 and 4-6 respectively (see Table 1). In the results, it was shown that there was no significant difference with regard to knowledge development (Table 4).
Table 4. The knowledge test results from flood walk activities.
Average scores from three questions in each stop
(Full score = 3)
Physical walk
Web-based walk
P value
(p<0.05)
Stop 2
1.53
1.20
0.209
Stop 5
1.98
2.08
0.623
Pupils’ attitude towards the learning of flood related issues
Regarding the impact of learning environment on pupils’ learning attitude of flood issue, the results from 10 post-questions revealed that the Web-based flood walk and physical flood walk environments generally had no different impact on pupils’ learning attitude (Table 5). However, with significant differences, the physical flood walk environment did enhance pupils’ understanding of flood issues happening in other places (4.9, p<0.05), promote pupils’ learning interests (5.1, p<0.05) and their motivation to explore more knowledge related to flood issues in the future (3.9, p<0.05). One thing that needs to be addressed is that pupils from the Web-based flood walk only showed a score of 2.3 concerning the exploration of flood related knowledge in the future.
Table 5. Results from questions about the learning environment (* with significant difference, p<0.05).
The scale is from 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly).
Physical walk
Web-based walk
P value
(p<0.05)
This learning environment helped me to understand the complexity of flood issues
5.8
5.4
0.186
This learning environment added knowledge of preventing flooding for me
5.8
5.4
0.202
This learning environment improved my ability to communicate with other people on floods
5.3
5.0
0.390
This learning environment improved my awareness of flooding
5.8
5.3
0.121
This learning environment helped me to understand the flood issue happening in other places (i.e. Bangkok in 2011)
4.9
3.9
0.022*
This learning environment made me understand the connection of different sectors (i.e. transportation, hospitals, electricity supply, etc) in society
5.2
4.9
0.562
Sharing the experiences of other sectors (i.e. transportation and hospitals) was the most interesting part of this learning environment
5.3
4.8
0.180
This learning environment promoted my learning interests and motivation to learn about flooding
5.1
4.3
0.035*
I would like to participate the same activity in the future
4.4
3.8
0.168
I will like to explore flood-related knowledge by myself in the future after this learning activity
3.9
2.3
0.000*
