Abstract—The increasing gap between children’s life
experience and school science is a worth noting phenomenon in
science education. To narrow the gap, the place-based education
(PBE), which promotes learning to be rooted in what is local,
has been undertaken and emphasized recently. In PBE,
students' local community is one of the primary learning
resources, so that students’ sense of place is an important factor
for learning. This study is the first article to explore students'
science learning from the sense of place point of view in Taiwan.
By using a one-group pretest-posttest design, this study explored
students’ sense of place and their learning achievement in
place-based science teaching. Participants included 21
fifth-grade students of a suburban school in Eastern Taiwan,
and the fifth-grade students of other schools in the same
township also finished posttest for reference. The results show
that the place-based science teaching could enhance not only
students’ sense of place but their science learning achievement.
Besides, students’ sense of place is connected with their
involvement in community. The longer the students live in the
community, the higher their sense of place is. Moreover, the
more students participate in community activities, the higher
their sense of place is.
Index Terms—Learning achievement, PBE, SOP.
H. Lee is with the National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, 97401
Taiwan (e-mail: leehuei@mail.ndhu.edu.tw).
C.-L. Chiang was with the National Dong Hwa University, Hualien,
97401 Taiwan (e-mail: clchiang@mail.ndhu.edu.tw).
Cite: Huei Lee and Chia-Ling Chiang, "Sense of Place and Science Achievement in the Place-Based Science Curriculum," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 6, no. 9, pp. 700-704, 2016.