The science behind outdoor play: Part 2

If research is going to inform practice successfully, it should show that the approaches it champions can work well with a diverse range of children…

Research in early years classrooms

I knew from the start that I wanted this research to take part in real EYFS classrooms, and in schools where they didn’t necessarily have lots of outdoor space and access to nature. So much research that I’d read as a teacher didn’t really apply to the context that I was working in, and I found it really frustrating that educators are often asked to base their practice on research that doesn’t always apply to real-world teaching and learning.

Lots of studies take place in a lab for example, or in a school, but where children are working 1:1 with a researcher, or where class sizes are very small and children don’t necessarily represent the general population. It’s amazing how many studies of child development have been done in nurseries that are situated on university campuses, where all of the university academics send their children. How often in real life do we work with groups of children who are all from highly educated, and often high income families?

I wanted this research to take place where I’d been teaching for several years, in Newham, a deprived area of East London which is also one of the most ethnically diverse places in the UK, and one of London’s boroughs with the worst access to green space. If research is going to inform practice successfully, it should show that the approaches it champions can work well with a diverse range of children, and even in settings where resources might be low, and teachers might face additional challenges.

How the research was conducted

The study itself took place over 2 years, with around 4 weeks being spent with each class of reception children. In order to investigate how children might feel, learn and behave differently in indoor and outdoor learning environments, children wore head mounted cameras, microphones, and heart rate monitors for 8 indoor and 8 outdoor sessions, where activities and resources were matched across both settings. A lot of existing research about outdoor learning is based on questionnaires or teacher observations which can be quite subjective, so I wanted to do something more scientific (we discuss this more in depth in the first podcast episode).

Using the video footage I was able to analyse how much time children spent on task, which activities they chose to engage with and how long they spent at each activity before moving on. I was interested to see whether their attention and focus was better outside. During story time I also used the camera footage to calculate how much time children spent looking at the story being read, and then I did a retelling and comprehension task with each child to see whether they had paid better attention to stories read indoors or outside. In addition to this, I looked at how many prosocial and antisocial incidents each child was involved in outside vs indoors, measured noise levels in decibels in each environment and monitored the children’s heart rates to see if they were more physiologically stressed in one environment or another.

Children’s and teachers’ reactions to the research

I was really lucky to have reception teachers that were extremely generous in how they responded to a researcher turning up and moving half of their lessons outside! I did everything I could to make sure that the research interfered as little as possible with the everyday routines and curriculum for the class, but it did inevitably cause a bit of chaos at times! We ran indoor and outdoor sessions throughout all seasons and even in the winter the children were always really happy when we said it was an outdoor session that day! The children really loved helping to move things outside to create an outdoor classroom. We had to keep things as consistent as possible between indoors and outside so it involved moving a lot of resources and even furniture!

The children were fascinated by the wearable equipment and I used a social story to introduce the classes to what the research was all about and what it meant to be part of a research experiment. I also ran sessions where the children could play with the equipment so they could get familiar with it before deciding whether or not they wanted to take part.

Most of the teachers were really interested in the study and started to notice changes in some of their children straight away when they saw them learning and playing outside.

Challenges of the research

Sometimes it was challenging asking teachers not to use things indoors that we couldn’t replicate outside, so for example, interactive whiteboards couldn’t be used for lessons as we wouldn’t be able to do that in an outdoor session and we had to keep everything matched as closely as possible. Similarly, if there was play equipment outside like a climbing frame or slide, children couldn’t use it during outdoor sessions as we didn’t have an equivalent indoors – so that was interesting, trying to get children not to play on those!

In terms of other challenges – well what didn’t we face?! Researching in schools and especially with young children is unpredictable and there will always be something unexpected thrown into the mix. We constantly had to rearrange outdoor sessions due to heat waves, gale force winds and even snow! We had outbreaks of chicken pox and Covid to contend with, Christmas performances, transition sessions, sports days and PPA sessions to work around, children who decided they didn’t want to wear the equipment half way through the project…

We also had children who forgot to take their head mounted cameras off before sneaking chocolate into the classroom and sharing it with friends – caught in the act! But this is what life is like in the early years, and anything that makes research more challenging, is also what makes your findings more likely to be relevant to real practice, so it was essential to embrace the chaos!

Coming in the next article of this series:

 The results of the study:
– Whether children are noisier and more stressed indoors or outside
– How being outside affected children’s attention
– How being outside affected children’s behaviour