Special Report: Research: Outdoor Learning - Research evidence: Study 4
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
The Council for Learning Outside the Classroom is a charity that promotes the opportunity for all children to experience life and lessons beyond the classroom as a regular part of growing up. It provides support on the ground, facilitating the sharing of best practice and promoting the benefits of outdoor learning for engaging children in education
Wilderness Schooling: A controlled trial of the impact of an outdoor education programme on attainment outcomes in primary school pupils
T Quibell, J Charlton, J Law, 2017
The attainment gap between high and low achieving children in the primary school years has a detrimental long-term effect on learning. Many initiatives have been introduced to close this gap. The Education Endowment Foundation and the Sutton Trust have developed a toolkit for schools which describes the most effective strategies for raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils as those involving collaborative learning, feedback, mastery, meta-cognition and self-regulation. Translating these findings into realistic strategies to implement within school presents a challenge to many teachers and school leaders. These strategies, though, can be easily realised through outdoor learning, as has been shown in other studies into the beneficial impacts of this approach. However, most outdoor learning programmes are unstructured and evidence is anecdotal. This study explores the potential of using a structured six-day curriculum-based outdoor learning programme for primary school children – ‘Wilderness Schooling’ – to improve attainment and close the gap.
Findings
- Increased attainment: The results revealed that children who participated in the “Wilderness Schooling” increased their attainment in English reading, writing and mathematics significantly more than children who received conventional classroom-based schooling.
- Sustained attainment: Rather than leading to an attainment “spike” during the intervention and immediately post-intervention with progress levelling off once children returned to the classroom, following a period of Wilderness Schooling learning continued to increase beyond intervention.
- Smaller group sizes: Smaller group sizes (maximum 15) created an opportunity for increased engagement on the part of pupils and increased attention from the teacher and facilitator allowing for high levels of positive reinforcements directed to each individual child on a personal level.
- Participatory learning: Wilderness School allowed the curriculum to be presented on a more practical level. Pupils had a greater opportunity to actively participate in their learning, share their thoughts, ideas and reflections, and to roam and interact, freed from the confinements of a classroom.
- Activating all the senses: Being outside activated the kinaesthetic and multi-sensory factors identified in other studies. This approach provided opportunities for increased engagement of all the senses – sight, sound, smell and touch – which enabled a more attentive and richer form of learning.
- Multiple-day delivery: The majority of outdoor learning programmes are delivered in single days. The six-day structured programme of Wilderness Schooling highlighted the greater value and impact of multiple-day delivery. This allows for significant change in children to occur and for this change to be reliably captured.
Implications for practice
- Multiple-day delivery on consecutive weeks targeted at curriculum activities leads to increased and sustained attainment.
- Structured outdoor learning can help all children from all backgrounds to achieve their potential.
- Learning outside the classroom has considerable potential for those who are disengaged with schooling.