What kind of fieldwork can you do at school?
Think of a question you want to answer or a problem that needs to be solved.
You could ask questions such as:Which area of the school grounds would be best for a wildlife garden?How can you make the school grounds safer?
Watch: Using fieldwork to solve problems
Play the video to watch Amber and Ben learn to use fieldwork to help solve problems within the school grounds.
Ben: Woah, cool bike!
Amber: It's the only way to travel! Look at Ms Hedley, and Mr Gupta! Oh, no. Mr Gupta can't find a space for his…er… bike?
Ben: I know. Let's find out how many people come to school on their bike. Then we can see if we need more bike racks.
Amber: But let's do it properly.
Ben: You mean?
Amber: Yes! Fieldwork!So we want to answer the question: "Does the school need more bike racks?"
Ben: Which fieldwork tools can we use?
Amber: We can use a questionnaire for everyone to fill in. We'll ask them to write down how they got school in the morning.Is it better to write down what people say? Or to give them choices?
Ben: If we give people choices we will find it easier to make graphs later on.
Amber: OK, so let's make sure we give people answers to choose from. When we've got our answers back from the questionnaires, we need to show what we have found out in a way that's easy to understand.
Ben: By using graphs!
Amber: Then we can see if the school has enough bike racks, or if we need to get some more.And the answer is… We need more bike racks!What could we have done better?
Ben: Well, we asked everyone how they got to school today, but maybe people change the way they get to school, like in winter when there's lots of snow.
Amber: Hmm, I think we may need to do some more investigating!
How do you carry out fieldwork at school?
There are lots of questions you could think of before you do fieldwork in your school grounds. For example:
- How many racks for bikes and scooters do we need?
- How could we find out what lives in the school pond?
- Where could we make a wildlife garden?
- Which part of the school grounds gets the most rain?
- How many people come to school every day?
Take a look at this step-by-step guide to carrying out fieldwork:
Image caption, 1. Plan your fieldwork
Look at photographs of your school to plan what question you would like to answer and what you are going to find out.
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Activity 1: Reading graphs
Activity 2: Fieldwork in your school quiz
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