Is naturalness associated with positive learning outcomes during environmental education field trips?

Abstract

Do more natural settings improve students’ learning? We collected surveys immediately following 283 U.S.-based environmental education (EE) field trip programs for youth and used land cover data to examine the relationship between levels of naturalness, defined as the percentage of natural land cover of the EE field trip site, and student learning outcomes. We also examined whether differences in levels of naturalness between students’ day-to-day environment and the field trip setting were related to student learning outcomes. When controlling for grade and race, both levels of naturalness and novel levels of naturalness accounted for approximately 4% of the variance in student outcomes suggesting that other field trip characteristics are more influential.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• naturalness
• novelty
• greenspace
• learning

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ryan Dale, Kaitlyn Hogarth, Tori Kleinbort, Hannah Lee, Eric Neff, Anna O’Hare, Daniel Pratson, and Neil Savage, who collected the field data for this project, and the 90 organizations around the United States who graciously participated in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The funding for this study was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Education program (DRL 1612416 and DRL 1906610) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant (MG-10-16-0057-16).