Abstract
The Field-Tourism Course that Aomori University has been working on since 2022 aims to develop human resources involved in community-based tourism, especially utilizing the natural and cultural resources of Aomori Prefecture. In this paper, we conducted a preliminary survey using mind maps and free descriptions to understand how the educational programs in the course are affecting the participating students. The results showed that students who attended lectures and experiential classes in the field tourism course extended their expressive vocabulary for 「nature-based tourism」 toward the post-test, and described technical terms and abstract words somewhat more frequently. From this, it can be inferred that students' understanding of field tourism was updated to a higher order before and after the class. In the future, it will be necessary to consider how to set up and conduct surveys that can approach more comprehensive and essential questions, and it will be necessary to integrate program experiments and survey research.
