The Impact of Visiting a Recycling Facility on Students’ Meaningful Learning

Hakan Türkmen

doi:10.17509/pdgia.v21i2.52854

The Impact of Visiting a Recycling Facility on Students’ Meaningful Learning

Hakan Türkmen

Abstract

The use of informal learning environments in teaching is an inevitable reality. Students create a schema in their mind by using the 5 senses and experiencing. In this study, 7th-grade students were taken to one of the Recycling facilities as part of the exploration phase of the Learning Cycle teaching model to teach the science subject of Domestic Waste and Recycling. Comparison Group Pre-test/Post-test of the quasi-experimental design was used as a research method in the study. The visit to the Recycling Facility has a crucial effect on the reason for this difference in the academic achievements of the students. The qualitative data showed that students have positive feelings, have a great time, enjoying collaborating with their friends. Thus they prefer to be taught in an informal learning environment. Learning in informal environments has more positive effects than learning at school. The reasons are students can actively question and discuss with friends, and reach information through exploration and/or the guidance of experts during the field trip. Thus students have meaningfully learned at cognitive and affective levels.

Keywords

Domestic Waste, Informal learning Environments, Learning Cycle model

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17509/pdgia.v21i2.52854