Students who directly participate during a field experience generate a more positive attitude about the subject. Many researchers have investigated knowledge gain and learning that occurred during field trips. Education is very important for an individual’s life. Education is a major aspect of development of any modern society.
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The importance of education is evident at every stage of education whether at primary, Junior Secondary, Senior Secondary and in Higher education. One type of informal learning experience, more commonly known as educational field trip, is valued by many educators for its potency to increase interest and enhance the information that is being taught inside the classroom.
FIELD TRIP
Field trip is one of the learning methods, it was considered as a flexible approach to providing meaningful learning opportunities in the community. The use of educational field trips has long been a major part of community health nursing educational program where students visit the community and places of public health importance. Visiting these places provides unique opportunities for learning that are not available within the four walls of the lecture halls. Field trips are valuable experiences for students because they have a lasting impact that goes beyond the learning of facts. They allow students to connect to knowledge content in personally relevant ways that promotes lifelong learning, also helpful for teachers. It clarifies, establish, correlate, coordinate accurate concepts, and enable them to make learning more effective, interesting, meaningful and bright as well. Moreover, these trips will also increase the efficiency of staff in teaching and changing student’s attitudes about providing services to the community
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS
Instructional materials refer to those alternative channels of communication, which a classroom teacher can use to concretize a concept during teaching and learning process. Traditionally, classroom teachers have relied heavily on the 'talk-chalk' method during their teaching. But recently, instructional materials help to provide variations in the ways in which messages are sent across. In using instructional materials teachers and accounting students do not only extend the range of sense organs we use but also extend the range of materials used for convening the same message through the same organ. For instance, in teaching a topic a teacher can manipulate real objects or use their stimulators. Instructional materials therefore constitute the media of exchange through which a message transaction is facilitated between a source and a receiver. In addition to extending the range of materials that can be used to convey the same instructional message to learner’s instructional materials also facilitate the 'process' nature of communication. In this passage, the process nature of communication implies that both the source and the receiver of a message are actively involved in a communication encounter. Infarct, it means that both the receiver and the source share and exchange ideas, feelings in any communication. One important dimension in teacher education that is getting a lot of attention is related to the use of instructional materials. Instructional materials are those materials used by a teacher to simplify their teaching. They include both visual and audio-visual aids and could either be concrete or non-concrete. These instructional materials bring life to learning by stimulating accounting students to learn. The use of instructional materials in the classroom has the potential to help the teacher explain new concepts clearly, resulting in better student understanding of the concepts being taught. However, they are not ends in themselves but they are means to an end. It is held that good teaching resources can never replace the teacher but the teacher uses them to achieve their teaching and learning objectives. Some of the instructional materials necessary for effective teaching and learning of Accounting include the chalkboard, models, graphs, charts, maps, pictures, diagrams, cartoons, slides, filmstrips, radio, and television. The importance of the use of these materials cannot be underscored. Instructional materials are essential since they help the teacher and learners avoid overemphasis on recitation and rote learning that can easily dominate a lesson. Resource materials allow learners to have practical experiences which help them to develop skills and concepts and to work in a variety of ways.
USE OF FIELD TRIP AND INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE
Field trips are a critical component of standards-based instruction in the classroom, not a separate activity, but a direct extension of classroom instruction. Field work is a type of instructional medium in use today, since instructional medium according to the author, is “anything (materials and equipment) that can help the teacher to communicate effectively his or her ideas to the students, so that at the end of the instruction the student can do that which the teacher stated in the objectives. Examples are: real object (specimen, models, excursions, field work) projected/non-projected images, print non-prints etc. Basically, field trip is seen as a support for effective teaching and not a centre of attention. Effective teaching should be the goal, and defines effective teaching as “getting the content (message) across in a manner that will accomplish the desired objectives, and add also that if at the end of the instruction, the student do what the teacher want them to do through the process of evaluation, then effective teaching has taken place. Furthermore, agricultural field trips by secondary school students were expected to enhance student learning experiences through interaction with resource persons and the environment. Such centers were supposed to provide better resources than the school for firsthand information, especially as learning outside the classroom aims at ensuring that all young people had chances to participate in high quality outdoor learning experiences. It also set out to improve academic achievement, developed skills and interdependent in a widening range of environments and provide the opportunity to acceptable levels of risk. But regrettably, many critics and observers have expressed that the whole exercise is a mere jamboree and a waste of time and energy and has not in any way responded to improve student’s performance.