Evaluating Week Without Walls and trip weeks

Many international schools set aside a week each year when classes leave school for trips, service projects and time outdoors. Schools call it Week Without Walls, Classroom Without Walls, expedition week or simply trip week. For Diploma students, a trip can count as a CAS experience. Schools put a great deal into these weeks, and most can say little about what they change.

What has been measured

Published evaluations are scarce. The most direct is a 2018 doctoral study at Drexel University of a Classroom Without Walls programme at an international school in Colombia. It surveyed 167 middle school students before and after their excursions, using an established outdoor-education questionnaire (ROPELOC). It found statistically significant gains in students' perceived personal abilities and in their perceived personal responsibility, and no significant difference between host-national and foreign-national students.

The study has limits its own design sets: one school, no comparison group, and answers that are students' views of themselves. It shows that trip weeks can be measured with a simple before-and-after design, and that the changes students report can be large enough to detect.

Measuring your own trip week

The method is the same as for any trip (see How to evaluate a school trip): the same short questions before the week, just after it and some weeks later, each student matched to their own answers.

Trip weeks bring two complications. Many trips run at once, so measure each trip and also the week as a whole: one trip may change confidence and another may change how students get on. And when a whole year group travels, there is no one left to compare with. In that case, compare trips with each other and with the same week in later years, and say plainly that there is no comparison group.

Record each student's year group or grade, so results can be read by age. Report a trip only when at least ten students on it answered; smaller trips can still count towards the week's totals.

What to tell parents and the board

Report what students said changed, by how much and for how many students, trip by trip and for the week. Say what the figures cannot show: answers are students' own views, and without a comparison group some change may have happened anyway. A board that sees the same report each year can judge which trips are worth repeating.