School-based outdoor education: a neglected practice at secondary level

ABSTRACT

This is an international study in which 125 secondary-level students from different European countries came together and were exposed to outdoor education. The purpose was to investigate the impact level of outdoor activities on the students’ success rates and explore how they perceived their experiences in outdoors. The analysis of the data gathered from pre- and post-tests and semi-structured in-depth interviews showed outdoor education could complement indoor teaching, clarify abstract theoretical points, expand content knowledge and raise test scores of the students. At the same time, with its motivating nature, outdoor learning helped the participants get ready for learning and use their higher order thinking skills, form good relationships with others, communicate and cooperate and build high levels of self-efficacy. This research affirms outdoor education is an effective, but mostly neglected, practice at secondary levels and recommends policymakers to re-evaluate their vision for the status of learning in outdoors.

KEYWORDS:

• School-based outdoor education
• intrinsic motivation
• permanent learning
• cooperative work
• self-efficacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is a part of an Erasmus+ Project, named Outdoor Education, which was funded by Turkish National Agency under Grant 2018-1-TR01-KA229-058529_1. This fund was used to implement Learning, Teaching and Training Activities in partner countries. However, we wish to confirm that there has been no significant financial support for the collection and the analysis of the data, writing process or publication.