Psychological benefits of a biodiversity-focussed outdoor learning program for primary school children

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.101381Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Taking part in nature-focussed activities improves children's mood and wellbeing.

  • The activities can be delivered at low cost in the local area; e.g. school grounds.

  • Connection to nature can be improved by participation in the activities.

Abstract

This investigation sought to discover whether engaging school children (aged 8–11) with nature could produce sustained improvements in mood and wellbeing in the long-term. We designed a program of biodiversity-focused activities carried out over one academic year in the school grounds. Participation in this program produced significant improvements in children's mood and wellbeing, which were sustained across the academic year. Improvements in wellbeing were not found in a control sample of children who did not take part in the activities. Children with initially lower feelings of connection to nature became more connected over the course of their participation. Building engagement with nature into school curricula could therefore be a low-cost way to improve children's psychological wellbeing.

Introduction

Poor mental health is one of the most significant economic and social challenges of the 21st century, estimated to cost over £100 billion per year in England alone (Centre for Mental Health, 2010). It is associated with a range of negative life outcomes including higher absenteeism from school, lower educational attainment, fewer personal relationships, and reduced life expectancy (Department of Health, 2011). Declines in mental health and wellbeing over the past 25 years are evident particularly in younger age-groups, with one recent report suggesting a six-fold increase in the proportion of children and young people diagnosed with a long-term mental health condition since 1995 (Pitchforth et al., 2018). Many factors may be contributing to this trend including economic uncertainty and the rise of social media (Pitchforth et al., 2018). However, one factor which is often overlooked is the pattern of rising urbanisation and disengagement from the natural world. This study aimed to address this gap, through exploring whether engaging children in the natural world results in positive psychological outcomes.

In Great Britain, 90% of the population lives in built-up urban environments (Miller, 2005). Such urbanisation drives the decline in wild space, resulting in habitat loss and threatening biodiversity (Dallimer et al., 2012; Seto, Güneralp, & Hutyra, 2012). As a result, the UK is now considered one of the “most nature-depleted countries in the world” (Hayhow et al., 2016, p. 6). The 2019 State of Nature Report (Hayhow et al., 2019, p.6) stating that "the abundance and distribution of the UK's species has, on average, declined since 1970 and many metrics suggest this decline has continued in the most recent decade". Other consequences of urbanisation include a decrease in the relationship that children enjoy with the natural environment (Seto, Fragkias, Güneralp, & Reilly, 2011), since they grow up with little day-to-day contact with green areas and native wildlife, representing a move towards a more indoor lifestyle. Wen, Kite, Merom, and Rissel (2009) identified that 37% of children spent less than 30 min playing outside after school, while 43% spent more than 2 h a day in front of televisions or computers. This is despite researchers identifying numerous benefits for children spending time outdoors and interacting with nature (Mcdowell, Macdonncha, & Herring, 2017) and has been suggested as one reason for a general decline in wellbeing (Louv, 2008).

According to a report for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (Bragg, Wood, Barton, & Pretty, 2013), children growing up in the UK today are more disconnected from the natural environment than any previous generation. The benefits of engaging with the natural environment on physical health and wellbeing are well documented (Wells, 2000). Alongside improvements in physical health (e.g., obesity; Bell, Wilson, & Liu, 2008; Sebire et al., 2011), other benefits include increased happiness, feelings of physical and mental energy (Ryan et al., 2010), and increased attention (Huynh, Craig, Janssen, & Pickett, 2013), cognitive ability and academic engagement and attainment (Payton et al., 2008). However, the aforementioned research has tended to focus on adult or clinical samples. Furthermore, these conclusions have been based on a loosely-applied definition of engagement with nature, spanning from pet ownership, to passively spending time in natural areas (e.g., walking in rural areas; Capaldi, Dopko, & Zelenski, 2014), to outdoor adventure programs (Lubans, Richards, Hillman, Faulkner, & Beauchamp, 2016). This presents two issues: firstly, and crucially, their application has often focussed on the effect of an isolated program on a specific outcome (such as attention), with relatively little focus on the psychological mechanisms underlying such an improvement. Whilst there have been some compelling theories proposed outlining what these mechanisms could be, these have generally been advanced as theses by environmentalists or educationalists without a strong empirical grounding. One such theoretical account that has become particularly influential in accounting for the beneficial effects of engaging with nature is the biophilia hypothesis, which suggests that humans have an innate tendency to connect with nature and other organisms, which leads us to derive cognitive and emotional satisfaction from them (Wilson, 1984). This study therefore aimed to provide a direct test of this theory. To do this, we measured nature connectivity as a demonstration of affinity and desire to connect to nature, predicting that stronger connection to nature would be associated with greater improvements in mood and wellbeing. We chose the Nature Connection Index (Chen-Hsuan Cheng & Monroe, 2012) to measure connectivity, since it had been validated for children in our target age group and reported by Bragg et al. (2013) as being easy to complete, as judged by the children and teachers in their study sample, and statistically reliable.

Another issue with previous research is that many of the studies which evaluate an active engagement intervention (e.g., Lubans et al., 2016) have used outdoor adventure programs, which would clearly be too costly to be offered widely and provide a confound insofar as they are designed to provide a novel and exciting experience. In contrast to outdoor adventure programs, Otto and Pensini (2017) carried out a school based project with 358 nine to 12-year-olds; they demonstrated that nature based environmental education increases connectedness to nature. Further research has shown that longer interventions are more likely to have a more positive outcome (Rickinson, 2001). Given the past literature, we aimed to assess the wider impact of taking part in a nature-focussed program, delivered in an everyday school environment, across the course of a full academic year. Through implementing this program within children's everyday school environment, it minimises the likelihood that the intervention setting or novelty of the activity might overpower the effects of engagement with nature. Furthermore, if successful in improving mood and wellbeing, this protocol would provide an easily adoptable program that could be embedded into the school curriculum. An additional advantage is that school fieldwork is an ideal vehicle for hands-on learning about nature, as it is known to help contextualise ecology in pupils' minds by taking it out of the textbook and into the environment (Lock & Tilling, 2002), with benefits for academic attainment. Furthermore, the intrinsically practical nature of fieldwork is supported by research which has found that hands-on interaction with nature maximises the resulting mental health benefits (Maller & Townsend, 2006), possibly via increased self-efficacy (Spencer & Blades, 2006). Finally, children's pleasure in engaging with nature is increased when they are able to shape their environment and interact with the species therein (Barthel, Belton, Raymond, & Giusti, 2018; Kyttä, 2004). Despite this, recent reports indicate that opportunities for curriculum-mandated fieldwork are declining (Outdoor Science Working Group 2011; Berks Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust, 2013; Lambert & Reiss, 2015). Most schools have access to at least some outdoor space which could be developed to encompass habitats, with state-funded schools recommended to make provision for this (Department for Education, 2014).

The current study therefore aimed to design and evaluate a simple and low-cost program of engagement with nature which, if effective in improving children's mental wellbeing, could be widely adopted to reach almost all children in society. We chose to focus in particular on children in primary schools, aged 8–11, as onset of symptoms of depression and anxiety peaks after the transition to secondary school, between the ages of 11–14 years (Joinson et al., 2012; Kessler et al., 2005), with a preceding decline in wellbeing in 10-12-year olds (Rees, Main, & Bradshaw, 2015). Research has found that to improve mental health, the focus should be on enhancing wellbeing as this promotes resilience (Lamers, Westerhof, Glas, & Bohlmeijer, 2015). In fact, poor wellbeing has been found to predict later depression (Grant; Guille, & Sen, 2013).

We hypothesised that this engagement with nature would have beneficial psychological outcomes for the children who participated in the program, with both immediate improvements in mood and a longer-term impact on wellbeing and connection to nature; in contrast, the control pupils in non-participating classes would show no change in mood, wellbeing and connection to nature.

Section snippets

Participants

We recruited 549 pupils, aged 8–11 years, from 11 schools across Surrey, Berkshire and Middlesex; 459 pupils participated in the biodiversity program, whilst an additional 90 children were recruited as controls from non-participating classes within four of the schools (three state-maintained schools and one privately funded school) to complete the surveys.

A literature search revealed no papers in this field which had used our chosen measures in a comparable way, but we calculated that these

Wellbeing

Overall, the children's average wellbeing score was 108.47 (95% CIs 106.65, 110.28); which is in the normal range for children of this age (8–11; KIDSCREEN Group Europe, 2006). Complete data sets for those taking part in the biodiversity program included 274 children, for the control group included 42 children. There was no significant difference in wellbeing scores for children in the program and control groups at baseline (before starting the sessions); Z = −0.51, p = 0.61, r = 0.03 (mean

Discussion

This paper presents a longitudinal study to measure the effect on mood, wellbeing and connection to nature of children aged 8–11 years participating in a program of nature-based outdoor activities in their school grounds. We found that taking part in these activities produced both immediate benefits for the children's mood across the course of each session, and longer-term improvements in their wellbeing across the duration of their year's participation in the program; whilst no such

Limitations

A core limitation of the current study is that we were unable to match the number of children in the control group to those taking part in the experimental programme, primarily due to participating schools wanting the program to be accessible to everyone and only committing if it was. Due to this, we aimed to ensure we recruited widely across a range of school types (state and private funding source). Given we found no effect depending on the school funding type for any of our measures, we

Conclusion

In this study, we examined whether engaging with a hands-on nature program delivered in the school grounds would improve children's wellbeing and mood, and enhance their connection to nature. We have shown that, even when time spent outdoors in nature is restricted to 1 h a week and repeated across the duration of a full academic year, children show an improvement in their mood and wellbeing. Furthermore, this does not require trips away from the school or expensive equipment. We also found

Author contributions

DJH, ACG, DW and HH designed the study, DJH recruited the schools and coordinated the data collection, DJH, LM and FH collected the data, DJH, LM and FH planned the projects, DJH, HH and LM wrote the manuscript, DJH, ACG, HH and DW carried out the analysis, ACG, DW, DJH, HH and LM edited the manuscript.

Funding

NERC Valuing Nature (5411/NEC05173; DJH, DW), Woodspring Trust (KTG/62258.1; DJH, ACG), RHUL Reid Studentship (LM) .

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to undergraduate students from Royal Holloway University of London for their assistance with the data collection including Ella Casson, Roxanne Appleyard, Lauren Riley, and Emma Randall. We would also like to thank the many undergraduate volunteers that helped with the project, the schools for allowing us to work with them, and the teachers and children who took part.

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