A Proposal for Geography Competence Assessment in Geography Fieldtrips for Sustainable Education

Abstract

The geography fieldtrip is a well-consolidated learning mode, but may become a procedural teaching strategy in geography. In geographical education, fieldtrips foster students’ overall knowledge-building processes to become world citizens, and thus to be fully committed to the Earth’s sustainability. Fieldtrips prepare students for applying and connecting knowledge in a real context. However, the geography fieldtrip may lack robust proposals on challenges and achievements that are clearly identified as assessable geographical geoabilities for competences. This paper offers a geography competence-oriented fieldtrip assessment framework. Project-based learning is chosen as the didactic approach, in which the fieldtrip project is built upon a real-world acute question of the students’ interest and choice, and solutions are reached following the enquiry learning method. The proposal brings cognitive domain (geographical thinking) and process (geospatial thinking) into alignment with geography and cross-cutting competences, corresponding geoabilities and geoskills, and learning outcomes in geography fieldtrips. The framework provides an assessment procedure (learning outcomes, tasks, and evidence) and tools (rubrics of evidence for learning outcomes) for fieldtrip geoskill assessment.