Impact of field visits on students’ knowledge towards rural development: an empirical study on Brac University
Description
The education system of the 21st century mainly accentuates on pragmatic and collaborative learning where field trip is one of the most prominent methods of learning. Considering this, Brac University arranges a lot of experiential learning activities. Visiting different programs of BRAC is one of them where every student of the university is taken to observe the development trends in rural areas of Bangladesh. This study explores the impact of those visits. The methodology of this research includes both qualitative and quantitative approaches. A survey was conducted where 200 students were selected who visited programs of BRAC. Subsequently, a focus group discussion was arranged where 40 students had taken part. The study shows that this field visit helps students becoming more attached to villages, and it inhibits a sense of responsibility among many of them. This research may help policymakers to design their curriculum more effectively in the future.
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To conduct the research and to have the necessary understanding of the impact of field visit the authors had selected the BRAC program visit. They went through possible methods and techniques to collect data. By nature, the study focused on both qualitative (documents review and Focus Group Discussion) and quantitative (survey) approaches. In this study, for collecting data from students, 200 students were randomly selected who visited different programs of BRAC (microfinance, education, and health). Later, we conducted two focus group discussions where 40 students were randomly selected, and half of them were taken from the group who visited the program twice to compare between a single visit and visiting twice. The sample size of the research was 200. The researchers followed a questionnaire for collecting data where the participants were the students of fall 2016, Brac University. Altogether 200 students took part in the survey during the semester. The questionnaire had 12 questions in combination of multiple choices, open-ended and positive to negative value-based questions. Before the students took part in the survey, they were well informed about the process. To ensure fairness, the participants were instructed not to write their names and identification number anywhere in the form.