2022 Volume 46 Issue 4 Pages 448-455
Disaster and disaster risk reduction are emphasized under the on-going curriculum revision in Nepal. However, there is a gap between topics in the current textbook and in the draft curriculum. Under these circumstances, this study examines the present situation of students’ perceptions and scientific understanding concerning disaster education through trial lessons on landslide disasters. Two trial lessons, ‘the function of water’ and ‘landslide disaster’, were carried out for 47 students in Grade 11 at a secondary school. Data was collected through questionnaires, worksheets and records of blackboard-writing to analyze the student’s understanding of the lessons and their attitudes of the lessons. The results are as follows: First, many students could understand how water affects humans and animals and causes landslides through the ‘function of water’. Second, it was difficult for the students to explain the mechanism of landslides by applying knowledge from the experiments. Third, the increase in the number of students who became more interested in disasters was not statistically significant. Almost all the students could predict a suitable path for evacuation by observing the landslide model and they seemed to think of the disaster as their own.
