Enhancing Science Knowledge Through School Gardens

Researchers and practitioners have documented gardens as part of schoolyards and pedagogical practices since at least the early 1900s, although they may have been part of educational practices, and certainly daily life, even earlier than that. Some of the many touted benefits of schoolyard gardens include providing active, engaging, real-world experiences; enhancing students' connection to nature; offering a setting for integrated, holistic learning; and fostering nature-related values. Yet one may ask what impact school gardens actually have on student learning. This paper's authors undertook a randomized controlled trial study in low-income schools to address that question. They set out to measure the effect of school gardens on student learning using the Garden Intervention Fidelity (GIF), a scale that the researchers developed to determine whether the intensity and rigor of a garden-based education experience influences student learning.

The authors implemented the study in 47 low-income elementary schools, and 151 classrooms, in Arkansas, Iowa, New York, and Washington. All schools included in the study had a student population where at least 50% of their students qualified to participate in free or reduced-price lunch programs. Cooperative Extension educators taught lessons for some classrooms. The study compared students who received a garden-related intervention with those in a control group that did not receive the intervention during the study period. (The control group received the intervention after completion of the study.) Researchers gave each participating classroom raised-bed garden kits, including a toolkit of garden-based lessons focused on nutrition, plant science, horticulture, and youth development. The toolkit contained 20 lessons for second- and third-grade students, and 20 lessons for fourth- and fifth-grade students. The intervention also included online training for educators, a garden-implementation guide, and generic resources for the school. The components of the GIF metric included the number of lessons implemented, the number of fruits and vegetables planted, the number of fruits and vegetables harvested, and the number of different methods of fruit and vegetable distribution.

Overall, students in the schools with the school garden treatment had modest, but statistically significant, gains in science knowledge as measured by a seven-question multiple-choice survey. However, when the authors controlled for GIF, they found a higher increase in science knowledge for classrooms with a higher GIF score; this means that the students with more lessons and interactions in the garden had higher increases in their science knowledge scores.

Although the study found only modest benefits in the science knowledge metric, the findings indicated other positive school-garden outcomes that the researchers did not measure in this study, such as cognitive functioning, physical activity, and collaboration. The authors note, however, that there are myriad reasons why this specific intervention may have yielded these knowledge-related results; they emphasize that further research should be conducted on the types of science knowledge impacted by school gardens as well as other factors that may affect the implementation of a garden project. In this way, researchers may shed more light on the connection between gardens and the range of related positive outcomes.