Poster #87 - What About the Impact of Outdoor Quality? The Unique Associations Between Outdoor Quality and Preschool Children’s Cognitive and Social Skills

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Early childhood education quality is an increasingly important area of investigation as many studies have pointed to long-term relationships between childcare quality and children’s outcomes, including social and cognitive skills (Lin & Magnuson, 2018; Sammons et al, 2015; Hestenes et al., 2014; Peisner‐Feinberg et al., 2003). More recently, outdoor environments have become another piece of the quality puzzle. Past research highlights associations between childcare outdoor environment design and young children’s physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development (Kemple et al., 2016; Li et al., 2016; Ludwig & Rauch, 2018). However, fewer studies have analyzed specifically the extent to which outdoor environment quality relates to young children’s outcomes. Moreover, most of these studies remain atheoretical and conducted in other countries. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner and Morris’ (2006) Bioecological Theory, Gibson’s (1974) Affordance Theory, Kaplan’s (1995) Attention Restoration Theory, the present study investigated how quality in outdoor learning environments contributed above and beyond classroom global quality to impact preschoolers’ cognitive and social skills. The study analyzed data collected in 2009 from a randomized sample of 92 licensed childcare programs and 405 preschool children located across North Carolina, United States. The Preschool Outdoor Environment Measurement Scale (POEMS; DeBord et al., 2005) and the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R; Harms et al., 2005) were utilized to measure outdoor quality and global classroom quality. A Natural Elements subscale, derived from POEMS items, specifically assessed the presence of natural elements in the outdoor settings. Children’s cognitive outcomes refer to their performance on flexible thinking and abstraction skills measured by Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST; Jacques & Zelazo, 2001), whereas their social outcomes came from the Conceptual Perspective Taking Task (CPT; Taylor, 1988) and teachers’ ratings using the Social Skills Inventory System (SSIS; Gresham & Elliot, 2008) Social Skills and Problem Behaviors subscales. Covariates included children’s age, sex and time spent in childcare per week. Multilevel analyses showed that outdoor environment quality in childcare settings predicted children’s FIST abstraction and FIST overall score above and beyond classroom global levels of quality. In addition, correlation analyses revealed an association between children’s participation in outdoor environments with more natural elements and fewer behavior problems as rated by their teachers. One of the limitations of this study is the fact that the ECERS-R and POEMS are both a snapshot of what is occurring indoors and outdoors, and they do not capture the consistency, complexity, and change in interactions over time that might explain variation in some children’s outcomes. A higher number of clusters (classrooms) would also have increased power on the multilevel analyses. Future research on the potential of childcare outdoor environments to support young children’s development might benefit from utilizing longitudinal designs and ecological theories of human development that shed light on the interactions occurring between individuals and context and the mutual effect of these elements in producing change over time. Additionally, outdoor quality measures need to be more widely tested in relation to child outcomes. Qualitative studies about outdoor environments may offer insights to outdoor quality tool design.

Authors

• Blenda Chor Rodrigues, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Linda Hestenes, University of North Carolina at Greensboro