Does a Focused, Hands-On “Treatment” Have a Long-Term Effect On Elementary Teacher Candidates' Conceptual Understanding of and Attitudes towards Soil?.

The hands-on study of soil concepts in K-4 classrooms is mandated in many American and Canadian science curriculum documents, both at a national as well as state/provincial level. Many excellent resources are available for teachers, including websites, science equipment kits, and exhibitions. Yet little study has been done on how well K-4 teachers, responsible for implementing this curriculum, either understand soil concepts or are concerned about the state of our soils. The first part of this present research resulted in the development and testing of a 32 item multiple-choice questionnaire on soils, together with an environmental attitudes survey, with several science methods classes of elementary pre-service teachers at two universities in Canada. The second part of the research, which will be reported on at this conference, consisted of developing and facilitating five hours of intensive hands-on activities with one of the classes of these elementary teachers on soil concepts and concerns, and using the questionnaire and survey in a pre-post format to test the effectiveness of the activities that took place. Although significant pre-post gains were observed with this one class, both in their understanding of soil concepts and in their environmental concern for soils, there was no significant correlation between these two measures, teacher by teacher. Interesting!