What an Expedition is
An Expedition is a field trip planned and run by a partner school and paid for by the foundation. For every Expedition, we provide direct-to-vendor payments for the major field trip expenses: transportation and admission. Every school’s needs are different, but we generally commit to funding at least one field trip for one grade level at each partner school per year.
Where the trip goes is up to the school. It might be a museum, a science center, a state park, or a historic site. What matters is that it connects to what the students are learning and gets them out of the building. Once a field trip has been funded and paid for, it’s time for the field trip! Every kid gets a t-shirt with the school’s name on the front and the MBF logo on the back, and we encourage our partners to share photos and stories about the experience.
What the research says
Field trips are not a day off from learning. In the first large-scale randomized study of school museum visits, covering more than 10,000 students, a single one-hour tour raised students’ critical thinking, historical empathy, and tolerance. Students from high-poverty schools gained two to three times more than average.1
Time outdoors does something similar. A week of outdoor science school raised science mastery by 27 percent, and the gain was still there six to ten weeks later.2 After a lesson held outside, teachers were able to teach for nearly twice as long before having to redirect the class.3 The students who benefit most are the ones least likely to get these experiences, which is why we focus on the schools we do.
- Greene, Kisida and Bowen, “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” Education Next, Winter 2014. Randomized study of 10,912 students across 123 schools.
- American Institutes for Research, “Effects of Outdoor Education Programs for Children in California,” 2005.
- Kuo, Browning and Penner, “Do Lessons in Nature Boost Subsequent Classroom Engagement?” Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.
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