Why field studies are the new essay

Art Lightstone

To my mind, the field study is the new essay. Don't get me wrong, I remain a staunch advocate for teaching essay writing (see the 80-Minute Challenge, the Art of Argument, and The Decline of the English Language), but I believe that students must understand how so much of the knowledge they are taught was actually generated in the first place. I think this will not only help them become better students, but critical thinking members of society as well. 

The benefits of teaching students about field studies, as well as involving students in the development of their own field studies, has itself been the topic of scholarly investigation. Dr. Barbara Manner published the results of her own investigation of field studies as a pedagogical approach back in 1995. She discovered that involving students in the creation of original field studies revealed many benefits. "For students, field studies create opportunities for first-hand experiences that encourage critical thinking, long-term retention, transfer potential, positive attitudes towards science, appreciation for nature, and increased scientific curiosity" (Manner, 1995).

I have integrated field studies into my economics programs for at least a couple of decades now. In more recent years, I have implemented a more comprehensive field study project across all of my courses. I find that my students not only enjoy the field study project, but they become far more comfortable with the basic scientific method involved in designing a study, collecting data, and the drawing inferences from that data. 

Over the years, my students have discovered so many interesting - even shocking - phenomenon through their own field investigations. Student field studies from my courses have generated data that would suggest:

• restaurants set prices so as to benefit from Canada's rounding to the nearest nickel law, 
• blue-eyed people are far less likely to require corrective lenses,
• people who speak two languages are inclined to achieve higher grades in school,
• people who wear watches are more inclined to achieve greater academic success,
• older people are more inclined to hold money at home in the form of cash,
• males are more prone to being left-handed, and
• youth will be served in retail outlets up to four times faster if they are dressed in a private school uniform.

These are just a few of the interesting inferences my students have discovered for themselves over the years. More importantly, while these students have been designing, implementing, and presenting their studies, they have also been examining and critiquing each other's studies in an effort to isolate possible flaws in study designs, such as post-hoc fallacies, false directions of causality, and composition errors.

Naturally, developing and implementing a field study is not something that students can do overnight. It is critical to first teach students what field studies are, and what they are not. In my program, I focus heavily on five main components of the field study. To my mind, these include the issue, methodology, findings, inferences, and directions for further study. I have included a link below to an activity that helps students explore and summarize field studies before they set about designing their own study. This activity encourages students to listen to online interviews between journalists and researchers discussing the findings of a new study. I have opted to pursue this approach because it requires students to listen to an entire discussion without searching for, or cutting and pasting, information from a web page. Moreover, this activity helps students differentiate between field studies and other things that might easily become confused with a field study, such as an experiment or mere anecdotal observations.

Consider implementing a small field study activity or even a larger field study project in your program. You may be surprised what your students will discover.


References:

Barbara Marras Manner (1995) Field Studies Benefit Students and Teachers. Journal of Geological Education: March 1995, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 128-131. 


Resources:

field_study_summary_report.pdf
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