The Impact of Outdoor Spaces on Children’s Stress, Attention and Behaviour: Investigating the Differential Effects of the Educational Environment

Time outdoors in natural surroundings has been evidenced, by a wide body of research, to have a positive impact on a range of outcomes for children. Despite this, children’s connection with the outdoors appears to be decreasing with each generation. Children are spending less time outdoors both during school hours and their free time. This thesis reviews the current evidence that nature has a positive impact on children’s stress, attention and behaviour, looking in particular at differential effects and the potential pathways through which this ‘nature-effect’ might occur.

Many urban schools face budget and curriculum constraints as well as a lack of nature on the school site, which prevents children from accessing nature easily. For this reason, this thesis examines the impact of relocating 4-5 year old children’s (n=76) everyday learning activities to urban outdoor spaces on their school site. Wearable equipment such as head mounted cameras, microphones and ECG monitors were used to gather objective data detailing children’s experiences of indoor and outdoor learning environments. Data collection took place across 8 indoor and 8 outdoor sessions, repeated across 7 classes of children within 4 different primary schools located in the London Borough of Newham, an ethnically diverse area with high rates of poverty and low levels of green space. Sessions were carefully matched across conditions in an attempt to isolate the specific impact of an urban outdoor environment.

Results reveal that children’s noise levels and resting heart rates were significantly lower outdoors, suggesting lower physiological stress. Analyses of attentional capacity show that children who struggle the most with their attention indoors, show significantly better attention in an outdoor environment. Finally, data indicates that children behave more prosocially in an outdoor environment, and that children who display the most antisocial behaviour indoors, are significantly less antisocial when interacting with peers outside.

Throughout, individual differences are explored and noise, heart rate and the amount of natural features in outdoor areas are investigated as potential mediators of effects. The discussion focuses on how these findings can influence education.