Not just having fun: Experiential‐learning–based school field trips improved local children's mental models of the mangrove nature reserve in Shenzhen, China

Nature‐based school field trips gained policy support from China governments. However, in a highly exam‐oriented education system, schools might be unwilling to implement such activities which they believe are merely fun journeys and useless for knowledge acquisition. We designed an experiential learning field trip to a local mangrove reserve for third graders and assessed how it changed their mental models about the mangrove ecosystem through pre‐ and post‐drawings. We analysed and scored the paired drawings through a rubric developed based on grounded theory coding procedures, used paired t‐tests to examine the changes, and qualitatively interpreted three example pairs from three groups divided by pre‐drawing scores. We deemed that participants' mental models improved, reflecting better knowledge about the mangrove ecosystem. We suggest that the notion of mental models of the environment is relevant to the needs of both formal schools and environmental organizations. By demonstrating a relatively successful nature‐based school field trip case involving pupils from China, we hope that formal schools of this country in the exam‐oriented educational context could utilize it as a justification and vicarious experience to participate in or implement such trips. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.