Forest Schools and Environmental Attitudes: a case study of children aged 8–11 years, which was published last year by Cogent Education, was made available to celebrate International Forest Day (March 21st).
This is what the paper's Abstract says:
"There is growing evidence that children in the UK are suffering from a lack of engagement with nature and the outdoor environment. This paper investigates the attitudes of children towards the natural environment and focuses on Forest School programmes as a mechanism to promote a “pro-environmental” attitude. The study identified that there was a statistically significant difference in environmental attitude between groups of children that had participated in a Forest Schools programme and those that had not participated, with children who have taken part in Forest Schools demonstrating a more pro-environmental attitude. Whilst it is recognised that Forest Schools may not be the only factor influencing these attitudes, this is still an important finding that adds to the overall benefits of participation in Forest Schools programmes."
The overall message here is a positive one, albeit hedged with some uncertainty about causality. But how much confidence should we place in what is written? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Six primary schools took part in the research reported here. Five were in Cumbria; one was in Glasgow. This mix seems strange to say the least, but no explanation is offered. Three were forest schools and three were not. A total of 59 children in the three forest schools supplied data in the form of a questionnaire; about twice as many responded from the non-forest schools. This was an opportunity sample (as opposed to anything more systematic), and so it would seem impossible to know whether these three schools were fully represented of the forest school experience. The results should be read with this in mind.
2. The authors point out some of the problems with this research, for example, that the children involved might not have been able fully to understand the questionnaire, and yet they made no attempt to check this out beforehand, putting their trust in an instrument that had been developed for use another context. They claim some credit for adjusting wording to make it more UK-focused, for example, changing “car pooling” to “car or lift sharing”, but they never bother to wonder what 8 year olds in Cumbria are likely to know about such a practice. Although readers are not shown what the other questions were, there has to be at least some doubt about how appropriate the questions really were for 8 to 10 year old British children, even if they could understand them.
3. Oddly, we are told anything about any of the schools that took part that would allow us to form judgements about what their children experienced in relation to environmental issues. For example, might it be that some of the non-forest schools did as much (or more) as the three forest schools did in terms of exposing children to environmental ideas and experiences? We don’t know because neither do the authors, as they never asked. Given that the children in one of the non-forest schools scored more highly than the children in one of the forest schools, might this be so – assuming, of course, that these differences are real and not just noise in the data (which is always possible).
4. Part of the paper is devoted to some forest school training that has nothing to do with the questionnaire survey, other than it involved children who went to one of the non-forest schools. Despite all the concerns about the prevalence of nature deficit disorder, etc, (which the paper emphasises), and the widespread moral panic about children never going into nature these days, quite bizarrely, all these children, had “visited woodlands with their families” which must give pause for thought about the nature of the sample in this non-forest school.
Ultimately, the problem of the paper lies in issues of causality; that is, are the scores the children accrue due to their experiences outwith the school (which is possible), or caused by their school experiences (which the authors claim). Or a bit of both? We cannot know, but the authors prefer to assume we can. The findings and conclusions have to be read in this light.
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