The general area of research is the development process of socio-emotional skills in adolescents. This is a specific domain of a child’s and adolescent’s development, which determines how competent a person is in regard to several areas of growth. These include building meaningful relationships with other individuals, managing emotions, recognizing emotions in oneself and others, and understanding and expressing emotional messages clearly. In addition, the social aspect includes identity development, friendship building, emotional regulation, self-esteem and self-confidence, and self-awareness.
It is important to note that a child’s or adolescent’s socio-emotional development is critical in order to make him or her a mentally and socially healthy adult. It is a foundational layer of one’s individual growth because the corresponding set of competencies determines one’s success and failure in a multitude of critical areas. Proper emotional management is required to maintain a healthy romantic or affectionate relationship, which constitutes a family-building process. Social skills are essential in advancing one’s professional growth and progression. An array of mental health problems, such as addiction, eating disorders, anxiety disorder, and depression, have emotional management elements to them. Being able to interact with other individuals prevents isolation, loneliness, and social dysregulation, which are additionally impacted by a person’s socio-emotional development.
Feelings of empathy, compassion, and love are fundamental in ensuring both personal and in-group development, which are key ingredients of healthy building patterns of bonding. Therefore, it should be noted that the general area of research has a high degree of criticality and essentiality, which is why exploring and understanding the ways outdoor interventions enable proper socio-emotional development is crucial. Social development is an integral quality that reflects the interaction of the individual and society, aimed at creating and solving the problems facing society. The social activity of the individual acts as a mechanism for its development. Social activity is realized through socially useful and socially significant activities. Social activity is formed through the interaction of the individual with the social environment, through the development of social ties, and understanding the flow of social processes and phenomena. In addition, it is important to note that these processes occur through personal communication and participation in the activities of pro-social associations.
In adolescence, the joy of communicating with peers gives rise to a purposefulness in adolescents, protects them from moral emptiness, and develops self-respect. Therefore, it is necessary to include adolescents in various types of collective activities, where they can reveal their talents and abilities and involve them in socially significant activities. Socially significant activity for teenagers is something that will contribute to the personal growth of a teenager, familiarizing him or her with social values.
Research Questions, Hypothesis, Research Design, and Operational Definitions for The Study
The key research question of the research proposal is the following:
In what ways does participation in a 1-week Outdoor Environmental Education Program administered by the CA State Department of Education affect 8th-grade students’ socio-emotional skills?
The underlying hypothesis is based on a body of evidence provided in the annotated bibliography section below. Children’s and adolescents’ social and emotional skills development can be greatly enhanced and facilitated by introducing outdoor programs. The research design is a qualitative-based teacher action research study due to the availability of access to learners in a classroom. The qualitative design is selected in order to enable an in-depth understanding of how socio-emotional skills are impacted by outdoor programs. In other words, the purpose is to explore various mechanisms behind the expected benefits. The method will focus on conducting interviews with students comprised of open-ended questions, which will allow them to report and reflect on possible mechanisms of action. The sample size is around 20 students, which is an average number of learners in a classroom. It is an adequate size for a qualitative study in order to focus on the depth of research rather than measuring specific quantitative metrics. The research aims to investigate a range of possible pathways of influence of outdoor programs on socio-emotional development. Operational definitions of key terms are as follows:
- Socio-emotional skills – a range of social and emotional competencies enabling a child or teenager to manage their emotions, recognize emotions in others and themselves, naturally interact in social environments and cope with conflicts in both domains.
- Outdoor Environmental Education Program administered by the CA State Department of Education – an evaluative program conducted by an independent evaluator to measure scholastic and behavioral benefits of outdoor environmental education.
Statement of Ethical Considerations
Since the research is centered around adolescents and 8th-grade students, there is an additional layer to ethical considerations. The core principles of research ethics will be followed alongside the code of ethical principles applicable to teachers. The research will be conducted under constant and continuous monitoring of an independent program evaluator to provide an extra degree of assurance. Any form of inappropriate behavior, language, or interaction will be prevented and explicitly warned about. Students will be aware, informed, and knowledgeable about the purpose of the outdoor programs. Permission will be acquired from every parent of each student for participation in the qualitative research. There is no conflict of interest, which could create an additional ethical consideration.
Justification/Rationale for The Study
The research is justified by the evidence of the benefits of outdoor education programs for students. The current system of education is primarily focused on improving the knowledge and competencies of students in the academic area, which mainly stimulates and grows the learner’s intellectual abilities. However, social and emotional skills are most often overlooked despite the fact that they are essential elements of a proper and healthy human development process. In other words, education needs to be comprehensive in order to ensure that children and adolescents can graduate from school as competent adults. The relevance can additionally be found in the importance of social and emotional skills in the modern creativity-driven labor market. With an increased level of automation and technological progress, human capital is valued primarily for its human skills, such as communication, leadership, creativity, innovativeness, and relationship.
Thus, the demanded set of skills and abilities cannot be fully developed with pure academic knowledge since it is only a sole domain of the complex framework of human growth. Educators and teachers need to be equipped with tools to address these areas of interest by ensuring that learners are both emotionally and socially competent. It should be noted that bullying, cyberbullying, school shootings, depression, loneliness, and many other problems plaguing school students cannot be comprehensively resolved with the use of academics. Both children and adolescents are exposed to a novel environment of the internet, social media, and political hostility, which are inherently emotional and social. Therefore, it is not simply beneficial but necessary to provide students with skills and abilities to be able to cope with a new set of challenges in the domain of emotions and social interactions.
Procedures
The study will be conducted as an exploratory qualitative teacher research study with the methodology of an interview comprised of open-ended questions. The data will be collected in both written, audio, and video format, with the identity of students being hidden unless the permission was provided by their parents. The collection of data will be conducted by me as their teacher and researcher. After the proposed 1-week outdoor program is completed, I will allocate one day for the interview process. The interview will be collected at the outdoor program site right after its full completion. The key limitation of the study is the reliance on students’ responses and their ability to communicate their experiences. The problem might occur if the program is disrupted by an unexpected event, occurrence, or accident, which will inevitably impact all participants.
The main data collection method will be complemented with a survey, which the students will be asked to fill in a written format. However, an individual interview process will be conducted with the independent evaluator, who will enable a multiplicity of sources of data. Having two methods of data collection will enable more robust findings through increased validity and reliability. The latter will be enhanced because the two instruments will have overlapping questions and approaches, and thus, acquiring a similar response twice will be an indicator of consistency and reliability. The validity will be enhanced by controlling more variables and removing teacher bias or interpretation by adding the independent evaluator to the outdoor program. The grouping of the class will be randomized to prevent any interview sample bias. The measurement technique will be improved by designing the open-ended questions and consulting the relevant experts and instructors.
Moreover, the analysis of data will be conducted by using both two frameworks, which include the grounded theory (GT) and narrative assessment. The former refers to the use of a selected ‘grounded’ theory to systematically apply to the collected data for analysis and interpretation. The GT will be based on the theory that outdoor programs improve children’s and adolescents’ socio-emotional development, which is why the questions will be mainly focused on social and emotional aspects rather than intellectual or academic areas. The narrative analysis will additionally be used in the form of note-taking and textual recording of the notable behavioral changes and events taking place during the program.
Population and Sample
The target population is comprised of approximately 20 8th grade students from Chico Junior High middle school. The research will be conducted in an educational setting situated within the proposed outdoor programs’ final day. The sampling process is based on the availability of students and my professional connectedness to these students as their teacher and educator. The participation will be announced, approved, and confirmed after the school and parents, as well as children, agree to participate. Therefore, it is really possible that only a portion of the class will partake in the study. The reality will place some limitations in the form of a limited sample size, which is why I plan to communicate the study’s underlying benefits and organization to parents individually and comprehensively.
Instrumentation
The primary instrumentation will be the interview protocol comprised of mostly open-ended questions. The given methodology complements the qualitative and exploratory nature of the research design by ensuring an in-depth analysis of various potential mechanisms of action provided by outdoor programs in regard to socio-emotional development. The instrument will be used as a small group interview, which means that the class will be divided into subgroups for a more convenient and comfortable interview experience. An individual interview might require an excessive amount of time, and children might feel isolated under such a format. The validity will be ensured by the participation of the independent evaluator in the process of data collection and analysis. In addition, many questions will be developed by consulting available experts, such as the instructor. The reliability will be enhanced by conducting both interviews and written surveys to enable consistency of the findings. The students will be randomly divided into small groups to improve validity further and be given surveys after the interview.
No instruments were fully developed to present in the given proposal yet. They will be added as soon as the instruments are reviewed and approved in regards to their plausibility and validity.
Validity
The triangulation approach will be used to ensure that the study is valid and focused on the phenomena of interest. Firstly, the data sources will come from multiple students in several groups as well as the independent evaluator of the program. Secondly, data will be collected as both an interview and survey to have both written and video data enabling greater reliability. Thirdly, the interpretation will be based on the grounded theory accompanied by the narrative analysis. Two instruments will be used for each aspect of the triangulation making the findings credible and reliable. A reader will be convinced by a multitude of interpretations of evidence and systematic analysis of all collected data. In addition, some variables will be controlled through randomization, where grouping will be random, but the questions will be the same. The time provided for each student to respond will additionally be controlled. Potential confounding variables will be identified within the research process and will be controlled in their impact in order to further improve validity.
External Validity
The generalizability of the findings is possible because the research question was carefully and attentively crafted to focus on the general domain of socio-emotional development. In other words, any improvement within the area of interest will fall into the category such as lower anxiety, better mood, new friendships, and other factors concerning social and emotional changes. The triangulation with the use of two methods for each aspect of the framework will increase the validity and reliability of the research. In other words, I will be able to claim that my findings will have implications for any population beyond the sample I actually studied. Firstly, the benefits of outdoor programs are not new, and there is plenty of evidence pointing toward the existence of the phenomenon. Secondly, the proposed research is exploratory and qualitative, which seeks to explore the ways the benefits manifest in particular. Thirdly, the focus of the study is not excessively specific but general, which is why its purpose is to understand how outdoor programs improve socio-emotional development. From the latter point, many specifically tailored quantitative studies can emerge from analyzing the phenomenon with higher precision and accuracy of measurement.
Threats to the Validity of the Proposed Study
The threats major threats to the internal validity of the study include the following:
- Threat #1: Subjects’ attitude towards the program;
- Threat #2: How the program is implemented could hinder students’ participation and attitudes;
- Threat #3: Students’ motivation to participate;
- Threat #4: The teacher’s bias towards a student or group of students.
The mitigation strategy will be based on the triangulation process. The first threat will be overcome by including them as a variable used in the interpretation process in order to ensure that it does not become an extraneous confounding variable. In addition, it will be used as one of the indicators of emotional state relevant to the research’s area of interest in regard to emotional development changes. The second threat will be addressed before the program is implemented by strictly adhering to the predetermined structure of the Outdoor Environmental Education Program administered by the CA State Department of Education. The third threat will additionally be included as a critical variable since the literature shows that motivation is affected by outdoor programs in a positive manner. In other words, it will serve as a relevant indicator of the implications and impacts caused by the program. The fourth threat is a major one, which will be mitigated by the addition and presence of an independent evaluator. It is essential to have such a professional when conducting the Outdoor Environmental Education Program administered by the CA State Department of Education.
Projected Data Analysis Procedures
The analysis of data will be conducted by using the combination of both the grounded theory and narrative interpretation. The former will be based on the body of evidence and the initial assumption that outdoor programs are positively associated with an improvement in socio-emotional development. These changes are manifested in fluctuations and alterations in various behavioral, cognitive, and emotional competencies as well as skills collectively presented and discussed in the annotated bibliography above. The narrative data analysis will be based on the data collected through the instruments accompanied by a textual or written note-taking process, which will take place daily while observing the students’ interactions with a novel environment.
The data collected will be itemized by dividing them into two main domains such as social development changes and emotional development changes. The data reduction strategy will be achieved by categorizing closely related factoring into one group within the corresponding domains. The data analysis strategy will adhere to the dual approach discussed in the paragraph above as well as in the instrumentation section. The key rationale is based on ensuring multiplicity of data analysis and reduction methods accompanied with the inclusion of the independent evaluator’s perspective to reduce the teacher bias. Data analysis will additionally factor in potential confounding variables in order to provide a comprehensive assessment and conclusion of the qualitative study. Since the research is designed to be exploratory by nature, many valid and plausible outcomes will be presented.
Expected Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations
The most central expectation and hypothesis in regards to the findings revolve around a socio-emotional development improvement among all students by the end of the 1-week Outdoor Environmental Education Program. The latter will be administered by the CA State Department of Education alongside the researcher. The expected conclusion can be that outdoor programs provide a better environment for students to bond outside the context of the school, which facilitates the development of better friendships and connections among each other. These forces might be the reason that facilitates the improvement of social skills since the interactions are more often and continuous rather than disrupted by the finalization of a typical school day. In addition, children are more likely to engage in physical recreational activities, which further increases the ways in which students interact with each other.
The emotional elements might improve due to the lack of constraints in the form of extensive demands put by academic tasks. The learners’ well-being might be enhanced by the reallocation of their mental and emotional skills, capacities, and resources for bonding and social interactions. However, since the proposed research is an exploratory qualitative teacher study, it is mainly designed to explore the ways these changes occur without the focus on the precision and accuracy of quantitative assessments. In other words, its purpose is to serve as a platform from which future studies could emerge. One potential future research would be to analyze the longitudinal effect of the outdoor program, such as measuring the metric of socio-emotional development after a week, a month, and three months. It would find whether or not there is a long-term impact of the program or if its improvements only last for the duration of the intervention itself. Another valid study would be the one focused on a specific domain, such as emotional or social development.
It is important to further study the need of society for the development of social activity in adolescence and aim at identifying educational conditions that ensure the effectiveness of this process. These conditions are specially created organizational or content conditions in a holistic educational process aimed at solving certain problems of upbringing and education. In the existing system, two types of developmental conditions can be distinguished and studied, such as external social and internal emotional. External include social, cultural, industrial, natural, and regional conditions. Internal is the conditions of the school environment, material and technical, educational and methodological, psychological, moral and ethical, and aesthetic.
The stated expectations allow one to conclude that adolescence is a period of formation of social activity. Social activity is directly related to the development of personality, as it helps to build the right relationship between a teenager and society. For future research, it is necessary to involve adolescents in various activities, as this is a mechanism for the development of their social activity. Social activity is not an innate quality but is formed through organized, purposeful educational work with children and adolescents. Therefore, the development of the social activity of adolescents will be facilitated by the active interaction of the school with public organizations of a pro-social orientation. When planning educational work on the development of the social and emotional activity of adolescents, one should take into account their psychological and social characteristics, needs, and inclinations. Thus, the development of the social and emotional activity of adolescents can be facilitated by stimulating them through programs. They should be aimed at deepening the range of social initiatives of adolescents and expanding the circle of their social contacts.
Annotated Bibliography
It is important to note that the annotated bibliography will provide a collection of recent research on the area of interest, which include socio-emotional development, outdoor program evaluations, and the role of education in them. The studies found are comprised of academic, peer-reviewed, and professionally relevant sources with a high degree of reliability and validity. The use of keywords and terms was the primary method of bibliography collection.
Topics of the Annotated Bibliography
The major topics include social skills development, emotional well-being, mental health, outdoor program benefits, and learner development. The selected subjects are relevant to the research area of interest and enable an in-depth analysis of the underlying mechanisms of action. The bibliography below assesses each source, summarizes its findings, and shows the connection to the proposed study. The sources are ordered in accordance with the first letter sorting as presented in the references.
American Institutes for Research. (2008). Effects of outdoor education programs for children in California [PDF document]. Web.
The given source is a report on the evaluation outcomes of an Outdoor Environmental Education Program administered by the CA State Department of Education. The document shows that the logistical aspect of an outdoor program is a manageable endeavor for any school, which does not incur a high cost (American Institutes for Research, 2008). The connection to the research proposal can be found in regards to the program itself, which will be applied to the learners as well.
Andre, E. K., Williams, N., Schwartz, F., & Bullard, C. (2017). Benefits of campus outdoor recreation programs: A review of the literature. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 9(1), 15-25. Web.
The study focused on the assessment of a wide range of benefits associated with outdoor programs. It found that the “benefits include increased academic success … better mental and physical health, lower levels of stress and anxiety, better and more numerous social connections, better intra- and interpersonal skills” (Andre et al., 2017, p. 15). In other words, the relevance to the research question is present when it comes to mental health, social connections, interpersonal skills, and lower anxiety and stress. All of these changes belong to the area of research interest, which is socio-emotional development.
Cottrell, J. R., & Cottrell, S. P. (2020). Outdoor skills education: What are the benefits for health, learning, and lifestyle? World Leisure Journal, 62(3), 219-241. Web.
The given source is a more recent study on the positive changes induced by outdoor programs. Its findings include “positive connections … made with the self, others, and the environment” (Cottrell & Cottrell, 2020, p. 219). The connection to the proposed research is in the social development element of socio-emotional development.
James, J. K., & Williams, T. (2017). School-based experiential outdoor education: A neglected necessity. Journal of Experiential Education, 40(1), 58–71. Web.
The study mainly focuses on the interconnectedness of outdoor programs and academic achievement. It found that such programs are “valuable in engaging the most apathetic and unmotivated students in minds-on learning. Building confidence and independence by solving problems” (James & Williams, 2017, p. 58). In other words, these outcomes and improvements indicate emotional development.
Murdock, M. L. (2007). Outdoor education as a protective school-based intervention for “at-risk” youth: A case study examining the Muskoka woods leadership experience for “Students of Promise” program (Publication No. 6991) [Master’s thesis, University of Windsor]. Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Web.
The source is a comprehensive and highly relevant piece of evidence showing the benefits of outdoor programs. It states that the most vulnerable, disadvantaged, and ‘at-risk’ learners’ behavior become more optimal under the given framework (Murdock, 2007). The relevance is manifested in the outdoor program itself, which will be similarly applied to the selected subjects.
Mygind, L., Kurtzhals, M., Nowell, C., Melby, P. S., Stevenson, M. P., Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Lum, J. A. G., Flensborg-Madsen, T., Bentsen, P., & Enticott, P. G. (2021). Landscapes of becoming social: A systematic review of the evidence for associations and pathways between interactions with nature and socioemotional development in children. Environment International, 146, 1-27. Web.
The research is an extensive analysis of nature-based outdoor programs and their implications on children’s development. It found that such interventions “improved aspects of cognition and … reduced risk of obesity and overweight in association with … tentative trends suggesting associations with play, motor skills, language, screen time, and communication skills” (Mygind et al., 2021, p. 1). The assessment is highly systematic and multifaceted, where the connection to the research proposal is found in regard to communication and social development.
Yıldırım, G., & Akamca, G. O. (2017). The effect of outdoor learning activities on the development of preschool children. South African Journal of Education, 37(2), 1-10. Web.
The study focuses on understanding how outdoor programs and activities benefit children. Its findings state that “outdoor activities improved cognitive, linguistic, social-emotional and motor skills of preschool children” (Yıldırım & Akamca, 2017, p. 1). The source is among the most relevant and connected studies to the research proposal due to the focus on similar areas of interest.