In my last article, we looked at the considerable benefits of taking learning outside, even if it does simply mean using the school grounds as a classroom (Ideas for taking learning outdoors, SecEd, June 2016: http://bit.ly/28M9VSc).
Here, we will examine the extraordinary impact of taking kids beyond the school grounds. The wealth of research in support is, quite simply, staggering, and at a time when our students are spending wholly inadequate time outdoors, we can expect the effects to be even more dramatic.
A study of secondary students from 11 California schools (SEER, 2000) that used an environmentally focused curriculum found that students scored higher in 72 per cent of the academic assessments than students from traditional schools. Another study (Eaton, 2000) found that outdoor learning experiences were more effective for developing cognitive skills.
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