The Effect of Field Trips to Historical Cultural Heritage Sites on Teacher Candidates’ Academic Knowledge and Their Sensitivity

Abstract

Culture is historical cultural accumulations that are acquired rather than being born with and are bequeathed to future generations. Today, technological developments resulting from globalization have affected societies and begun to destroy cultures. Realizing this, Turkey and many countries have started Historical Cultural Heritage Education to protect historical cultural heritage and to raise awareness of younger generations. To increase the teacher candidates’ academic knowledge and teach the importance of historical cultural heritage, in-class activities are done and lectures are given in universities’ education faculties. However, it is seen that these activities do not make sense for them and therefore their academic knowledge and their sensitivity do not increase enough. In this study, teacher candidates’ sensitivity about historical cultural heritage and their academic knowledge was determined by the field trip taken to Tarsus’s historical cultural sites. The sample of this study is 30 second and third year social studies teacher candidates attending Nigde University. One group pre-test, post-test experimental design was used. After literature review, a 30-question survey was developed for data collection. The survey was conducted before and after the trip. The data was analyzed with SPSS. As a result of t-test, the difference between the sensitivity pre-test and post-test scores was 1.60, which was statistically significant. The difference between the academic knowledge pre-test and post-test scores was 4.2, which was also statistically significant. These findings showed that field trips should be organized more.