The impact of school gardens on youth social and emotional learning: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has five competencies: relationship skills, responsible decision-making, self-awareness, social awareness, and self-management. A promising practice to promote positive SEL is school garden programming. There is a need to understand how school gardens impact SEL by consolidating existing research. In this scoping review, we synthesized evidence describing the impact of school gardens on youth SEL. We included studies that described school garden interventions, collected data from youth, and measured SEL. We screened 1589 abstracts and 76 full-text articles. Eight studies met the inclusion criteria. While the included qualitative studies demonstrated that school garden programming can positively influence SEL, the included quantitative studies had few statistically significant results. Thus, at this time we can only say that qualitative research from five studies suggests that school garden programs have the potential to successfully enhance experiences that promote SEL but more research is needed to further investigate this claim.

KEYWORDS:

• Social and emotional learning
• adolescent health
• child health
• school gardens
• health promotion

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to disclose.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Abby M Lohr

Abby M. Lohr, MPH, is a PhD candidate in Health Behavior Health Promotion at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She works as a research coordinator for the Arizona Prevention Research Center. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Arizona. Her primary research focus is on the impact of school gardens on youth behavior. This paper was part of her dissertation work.

Keegan C. Krause

Keegan C. Krause, MPH, MA is a PhD student in biological and medical anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Keegan received his MPH in global family health and MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. A past K-12 educator, Keegan’s research now focuses on embodied violence and the epigenetic substructure of health experiences in US-Mexico borderlands.

D. Jean McClelland

D. Jean McClelland, MLS, is an Assistant Librarian and Liaison to the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Library. She has also worked at the college as program evaluator and community-based collaborative researcher in Arizona’s rural and border communities since 1990, providing technical assistance, information resource development and data sharing related to coordinated community response, health disparities and social justice for providers serving historically marginalized people, including immigrants, farmworkers and refugees.

Noah Van Gorden

Noah Van Gorden is a graduate student in computer sciences at Arizona State University. He received a Bachelors of Science in Nursing from the University of Arizona. He is interested in using computer algorithms to solve data science challenges.

Lynn B Gerald

Lynn B. Gerald, PhD, MSPH, is the Canyon Ranch Endowed Chair and professor in the Department of Health Promotion Sciences at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, and associate director for clinical research with the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center at the University of Arizona Health Sciences. She is an expert in the area of school-based asthma. She received her PhD and Master’s of Science in Public Health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham as well as a Master’s of Art in Sociology from the University of South Alabama.

Vincent Del Casino

Vincent Del Casino Jr., PhD, MS, is a Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at San Jose State University. Dr. Del Casino is a broadly trained human geographer with interests in social and cultural geography, health geography, geographic thought and history, sexuality studies, HIV/AIDS, and sexual health and politics in Southeast Asia and Long Beach, California. He received a PhD from the University of Kentucky and a Master’s of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Geography. His most recent work has examined the human-nonhuman relations, with a particular focus on robots and robotic technologies as well as the politics of spectacle.

Ada Wilkinson-Lee

Ada Wilkinson-Lee, PhD, MS, is an Associate Professor in the College of Behavioral Sciences in the Mexican American Studies Department at the University of Arizona. Her research, teaching and service are centered on addressing Latino health from a community-based participatory action research perspective. Dr. Wilkinson-Lee’s current and future research endeavors consist of a continuation of addressing Latino health disparities from a social psychological perspective using mixed methods and innovative methodology. Both her PhD and Master’s degrees are from the University of Arizona. She received her PhD in Family Studies and Human Development. Her Master’s degree is in Mexican American Studies with an emphasis on Latino Health.

Scott C. Carvajal

Scott C. Carvajal, PhD, MPH is a Professor and Program Director in Health Behavior Health Promotion at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. He is the PI/Co-Director of the Arizona Prevention Research Center and is a multi-discipline trained applied social and quantitative psychologist with expertise in health promotion theory, Latino/cultural behavioral research methods, intervention design and evaluation methods. He earned both his PhD in Social Psychology and Quantitative Methods as well as a Master’s of Art in Psychology from the University of Houston. Additionally, he has a Master’s of Public Health from the University of Texas Houston.