Students were more engaged and less distracted after lessons in a natural outdoor setting compared to classroom-based lessons

This study tested the idea that lessons in nature have positive aftereffects on student engagement in subsequent indoor classroom instruction. The study was based on two previous lines of research: experimental work showing immediate positive aftereffects of contact with nature on basic psychological processes relevant to classroom engagement (e.g. attention, impulse control, and intrinsic interest in learning) and large correlational studies linking greener near-school landscapes with higher standardized academic achievement scores. The current study suggests a bridge between these two lines of research.

For this study, a mini-experiment was replicated 20 times with two groups of third-grade students. Each mini-experiment consisted of a lesson in nature and a matched lesson in the classroom on the same topic, using the same type of instructional style, with the same teacher and students. The outdoor lessons were delivered first (i.e. prior to the indoor lessons) roughly as often as they were delivered second. The matched lessons were based on 10 different instructional topics delivered once per week in each of two classrooms. The instructional topics were based on themes from the Project Learning Tree environmental education curriculum. Researchers collected data on student engagement in the classroom after both the indoor and outdoor lesson. Before the study began, the two participating teachers had somewhat differing expectations on student engagement after lessons in nature. While one teacher tended to think that the positive effects of lessons in nature might outweigh the negative, the other tended to think that lessons in nature might leave students “too wired” to engage in classroom material.

The researchers used four measures to assess classroom engagement: (1) teacher ratings; (2) student ratings of engagement of self, peers and the classroom as a whole; (3) “redirects (the number of times teachers had to interrupt instruction to redirect a student's attention to the task at-hand); and (4) independent photo ratings (ratings of classroom engagement by an independent observer based on photographs of the observation period). Redirection and photo raters were not aware of which type of lesson students had just participated in. These four measures were then combined into a Composite Index of Classroom Engagement.

Although student's ratings of their own engagement were insensitive (uniformly positive regardless of type of lesson) and therefore not included in analysis, the other ratings indicated that classroom engagement was significantly better after lessons in nature than after their matched counterparts. This nature advantage held across two teachers and persisted across 10 weeks and different instructional topics.

Instead of leaving students “too wired” to concentrate after an instructional period outdoors, this well controlled experimental study demonstrated that lessons in nature may leave students better able to engage in the next lesson. These findings provide a strong rationale for including more lessons in nature in formal education.