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Poem The Education of Nature, Summary and Critical Appreciation

Introduction of the poem.

‘The Education of Nature’ is a part of the collection, he wrote under the title ‘Poems of Imagination’ . This poem has another title, ‘Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower’ . It was composed in 1799 in the Hartz forest during Wordsworth stay in Germany. It was published in the second edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ in 1800. This poem belongs to a group of poems called ‘Lucy Poems’ . It was given the title ‘The Education of Nature’ , in Palgrave's ‘Golden Treasury’ . The poem suggests an underlying influence of Rousseau, the French philosopher, who believed that Nature has the power to educate the mind of man.

Poem The Education of Nature, Summary and Critical Appreciation

This poem successfully depicts the educative impact of imparting perfection and purity that is extended through the effect of Nature on the life and behaviour of a young girl Lucy. Palgrave titled it so partly because the theme of the poem is the influence of Nature on the build - up of human body and mind and partly because Wordsworth was greatly impressed by Rousseau, who regarded Nature as ultimate teacher.

The poem upholds Wordsworth's beliefs that a spirit of joy runs through all objects and creatures of Nature. And also that an all pervading Divine Spirit is present in Nature and it has a will of its own. The poem successfully depicts the educative impact of imparting perfection and purity that is extended through the effect of Nature on life and behaviour of a young girl Lucy.

Nature itself is the chief speaker and gives a detailed description of the beauty and innocence of the little girl Lucy. This girl, as described in this poem, was a young and beautiful girl, very dear to the poet. The identity of Lucy has not been established, i.e., who that child was.

The poet tells only that Lucy was born and grew up in the lap of Nature. She lived through all sorts of weather like a wild plant. She was the loveliest plant.

All that we learn is her perfect and pure portrayal of the brilliance of her childhood. She is so exquisite in every way that Nature can't conceive of her as a separate entity. Nature has a will of her own. It decides herself to take Lucy away from this world, by adopting her as her own child and educate her in her way. She will be both law and impulse to her, i.e., law. It will check her from going astray or doing anything evil and as an impulse; it would inspire her to do noble deeds.

For, Nature wants to be completely bound in closeness and fellowship with the little child, Lucy also becomes Nature's symbol of perfection. According to the poet, placing a child in Nature's care is enough education for him / her. Unfortunately Lucy's life comes to an abrupt and early end. So intense is Nature's love for her that after her death, Nature itself seems to mourn in deep despair for the loss of Lucy's life. Even after death, Lucy's presence fills the hills and valleys with ultimate joy.

The poem presents the perfection of mind and form that Nature can bestow on a mortal, in the person of Lucy. Thus there is an autobiographical element in the poem.

Summary of the Poem:

The poem illustrates very beautifully Wordsworth's conception of Nature. To him, God is everywhere, manifested in the harmony of Nature and he felt deeply the kinship between Nature and the soul of mankind. This poem, i.e., one of the Lucy poems, shows Rousseau's influence, to some extent, on Wordsworth who believed that Nature is our teacher. That's why, he personifies nature in this poem and invests natural objects with a living, thinking and feeling power.

Lucy is Nature's own child, her darling. She grows up in the midst of Nature's magnificence for three years. She lives through all sorts of weather like a wild plant. Nature declares her to be the loveliest flower on earth that was ever grown. She proposes to undertake the responsibility of educating Lucy according to her own way and liking. She will be law and impulse to the girl. She'll let Lucy enjoy her freedom and have her heart's desire. She'll leap with joy like a fawn. But at the same time, she'll also learn to discipline herself. As law, Nature will prevent her from evil and as impulse; she'll inspire Lucy to noble actions. Lucy will have the freedom to roam amidst the rocks and plains; on the earth and in the sky; in the glade and in the bower.

And everywhere she will experience the presence of the all-pervading Divine spirit present in Nature and she will keep watch over Lucy. Lucy will learn sportiveness from the fawn. She would be as sprightly as the fawn playing among the hills and lawns. The inanimate objects of Nature would teach her the special value of silence and tranquility. The floating clouds would lend elegance to her movements, the willow trees would lend her its flexibility. She will not fail to see the beauty even in the agitation of the storm that would mould the young girl's form. She'll learn grace which will mould her maiden's form into a perfect mature woman.

Lucy would learn to love stars in the dark midnight sky. She'll visit many quiet and lovely places and hear the sweet murmur of streams. She'll watch the small beautiful girls that are dancing not according to any rules but spontaneously inspired by their heart joy. This joy will pass into her face. The life - giving feeling of joy will develop her mind and body. This union, born from joy will make her charming graceful woman. Nature will educate Lucy as long as she will live in communion with Nature.

Nature kept her word and educated Lucy the way she promised. But unfortunately Lucy died young. It left the poet alone in the world with the memory of Lucy, with the memories of fields where Lucy had played, with the memories of her unique education by Nature and her spirit which shall never witness in future. Nature would always miss her with a sorrow stricken heart.

Critical Appreciation of the Poem:

Wordsworth had immense belief in nature's inspiring force. He believes that nature is a universal chorus constantly communicating with man. He agreed with Rousseau that a child, allowed to satisfy his natural curiosity and encouraged to follow his own intuitions, would develop into a better being than a child grown up in the artificial atmosphere of educational institutions. And, nature is our great teacher; it exerts an edifying and moral influence on man.

In this poem, Nature acts as a loving mother and an effective teacher to Lucy. Nature has been personified and thus it is written with capital N . She determines to adopt Lucy and make her ‘A lady of my own’.

After having decided to adopt Lucy, this idea is elaborated; Nature reveals the methods to achieve Her objectives in the stanza. The process consists of taking up opposing principles to create the living complexity, marked by the antithesis between ‘law and impulse’, ‘rock and plain’, ‘earth and heaven’, ‘glade and bower’ and ‘kindle and restrain.’

Being law and impulse, Nature checks Lucy from any negative energy, i.e., evils and also inspires her to do positive, i.e., noble deeds. As a guide, she would imbibe the best from her surroundings and the sheer joy of spontaneity would help in developing her natural faculties.

The comparisons and contrasts used by the poet to his thoughts, while describing the Nature, has made the composition beautiful the fawn by frolicking in the lawns, clouds floating calmly in the sky, the graceful willow trees bending, the sparking of stars at midnight, gently murmuring rivulets. There is no contradiction in Nature while doing these comparisons. Every sight and sound has its own effect on the child of Nature.

The poet has emphasized the physical as well as the mental development through intimate association.

The fifth stanza is onomatopoeic in nature because words, in this stanza, have been used in such a manner that their sound suggests the sense. The final stanza, which ends on a sad note of Lucy's death, is not merely a lament over the death of a particular young female. It is a statement on the condition of all human life, in which all the powers of Nature combine in complex ways to create a human being, who is doomed to death by Nature's law.

The poet, we can say, breathes new life into the lyric form. The delicate elegance of the descriptions in this poem are noteworthy. The language is simple with no pretensions to grandeur. The poem has a beautiful blend of sound and sense. In all, the poem reflects Wordsworth's excellence over simple technical skill.

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Ecological Literacy in Education: Empowering Students to Understand, Appreciate, and Conserve Nature

In an era where environmental challenges are becoming increasingly pressing, fostering ecological literacy among students has never been more crucial. Ecological literacy goes beyond simply understanding the natural world.

It encompasses a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of ecosystems, the importance of biodiversity, and the urgency of conservation efforts. Integrating ecological literacy into education equips students with the knowledge and mindset necessary to become responsible stewards of the planet.

This article explores the significance of ecological literacy in education and highlights ways to empower students to understand, appreciate, and conserve nature.

Understanding Ecological Literacy

Ecological literacy refers to a comprehensive understanding of ecological concepts, systems, and processes. It goes beyond memorizing facts and terms; it involves grasping the intricate relationships between organisms, their environments, and the impact of human activities on these systems.

An ecologically literate individual can recognize how the health of ecosystems directly affects human well-being, and vice versa. This knowledge forms the foundation for informed decision-making and sustainable practices.

The Benefits of Ecological Literacy

Informed Decision-Making: Ecologically literate individuals are better equipped to make environmentally conscious decisions in their personal lives and careers. Whether it’s choosing sustainable products, supporting conservation initiatives, or advocating for responsible policies, their decisions are rooted in a profound understanding of ecological dynamics.
Fostering Environmental Stewardship: Ecological literacy nurtures a sense of responsibility and connection to the natural world. Students who develop an appreciation for the intricate beauty and functionality of ecosystems are more likely to become passionate advocates for environmental protection.
Addressing Global Challenges: Climate change, habitat loss, and pollution are global challenges that demand collective action. Ecologically literate citizens are crucial for devising innovative solutions, driving policy changes, and influencing societal behaviors to mitigate these issues.
Interdisciplinary Learning: Ecological literacy naturally integrates various disciplines such as biology, geography, chemistry, and social sciences. This interdisciplinary approach encourages holistic thinking and a broader perspective on complex environmental issues.

Empowering Students: Strategies for Ecological Literacy

studying a calculation of plant species ecological

Empowering students with ecological literacy involves engaging them in meaningful learning experiences that foster a deep connection to the environment. By implementing a variety of strategies, educators can inspire students to not only understand but also appreciate and conserve nature. Let’s delve into some effective approaches:

Hands-On Experiences: The power of direct interaction with nature cannot be overstated. Organize field trips to local ecosystems, botanical gardens, or wildlife reserves, where students can observe ecological interactions up close. These outings encourage curiosity and provide real-world context to classroom learning. Whether it’s examining plant adaptations, observing animal behaviors, or studying water quality, these experiences offer valuable insights into ecological systems.
Curriculum Integration: Ecological literacy shouldn’t be confined to science classes alone. Infuse ecological concepts into various subjects to showcase the interconnectedness of ecosystems with history, literature, art, and even mathematics. For instance, literature classes can explore the depiction of nature in poems and novels, while history classes can examine the environmental impact of key events. This interdisciplinary approach widens students’ perspectives and highlights the relevance of ecological understanding in diverse fields.

Guest Speakers and Experts: Inviting experts in the field of ecology and environmental conservation can add a dynamic dimension to students’ learning experiences. Guest speakers can share their experiences, research findings, and real-world insights, demonstrating the practical applications of ecological knowledge. Students can interact with professionals who have worked on conservation projects, conducted ecological research, or developed sustainable practices.
Technology and Virtual Resources: In a digitally connected world, technology can bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world ecological scenarios. Utilize virtual simulations, online ecosystem models, and interactive data visualizations to engage students in understanding complex ecological concepts. Online resources can provide interactive experiences, making abstract concepts more tangible and relatable.
Community Engagement: Collaborate with local environmental organizations, conservation groups, or governmental agencies to involve students in community-driven conservation efforts. Participating in tree planting, beach cleanups, or habitat restoration projects gives students a tangible sense of contributing to the well-being of their community and the planet. This hands-on involvement reinforces the idea that individual actions can collectively make a significant impact.

By embracing these strategies, educators can foster a generation of environmentally conscious and ecologically literate individuals who are well-equipped to face the challenges of an ever-changing world.

To further enhance students’ educational journey, resources like essay writing services can provide support in creating impactful essays, reports, and projects related to ecological literacy.

These services offer students a platform to explore their thoughts, articulate their understanding, and communicate their passion for the environment effectively.

Ecological literacy is not just a subject to be studied; it is a mindset that shapes how individuals perceive and interact with the world around them. By embedding ecological concepts into education, we equip students with the knowledge, empathy, and skills needed to become effective advocates for nature.

As students develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the intricate web of life, they are empowered to take action, driving positive change for a more sustainable and harmonious future.

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Open access
Published: 23 March 2018

The nature and nurture of education

Pankaj Sah 1 ,
Michael Fanselow 2 ,
Gregory J. Quirk 3 ,
John Hattie 4 ,
Jason Mattingley ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0929-9216 1 &
Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa 5

npj Science of Learning volume 3 , Article number: 6 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Learning is a life-long endeavour that continues from infancy to old age. We each navigate the learning process in different ways, yielding to our experiences and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. For many people, formal education takes place between the ages of 6–18, where we are educated based on core curricula that are delivered through a schooling system. Many countries have some form of compulsory education for children until they reach adulthood, but the route through the school system can vary greatly. In many first world countries, the choice is between public schools, generally funded by the state, and private schools which are funded through a combination of individual tuition fees, and religious or corporate institutions. School education is generally required by government mandate, and the cost of admission and tuition in public schools is borne by the state. In contrast, entry into a private school is often primarily dependent on socioeconomic status and some form of selection process—either formal testing or religious affiliation.

In many countries, studies have suggested that students attending private schools attain better educational outcomes, and long-term socioeconomic benefits. These data are then used by private schools to encourage attendance in this selective system. Private schools are generally expensive but may provide more individualized programs of study with better student–faculty ratios then those provided by public schools.

The choice parents make in selecting schools for their children, and the differences between public and private schools has been the subject of much debate, that is largely couched in social and economic terms. In a collection of manuscripts published in npj Science of Learning , two groups of researchers have approached this discussion from an interesting new direction—genetics. The Nature versus Nurture question has been greatly debated for many years, because it is not entirely clear which is the greatest influence on human development and behaviour. Although we are all born with a specific set of genes, with no control over our genetic allocation, we now know our life-style choices and different experiences though development and maturity also influence gene expression, and thus exert control over our behaviour via epigenetic modifications. Epigenetic mechanisms regulate the structure and activity of the genome in response to cellular and environmental cues, one such mechanism involves DNA methylation. Thus, biological processes are controlled by a combination of inherited genes and the life-long impact of epigenetic modifications that regulates their expression. Who we are is not simply a result of either nature or nurture but rather is shaped by a combination of these factors. Recent advances in genomic and epigenomic sequencing, have led to a growing interest in using this information to predict biological outcomes, and disease pathogenesis and help guide individuals in lifestyle choices and behaviour.

Two papers 1 , 2 published in npj Science of Learning have worked to address the question of 'Does an individual’s genetic makeup, and epigenetic modification, affect his or her educational attainment?'. Educational attainment is a measure of the highest level of education that an individual has completed at the end of full-time compulsory education. Educational attainment has been shown to strongly correlate with mental and physical health, as well as socioeconomic status, and is one of the strongest predictors of lifetime success, not only economically but also in terms of health and longevity.

In one study, 1 Smith–Woolley and colleagues looked at educational attainment in three groups of students in Britain that attended either: public schools, private schools or selective schools. The researchers found that as previously reported, students in private schools had higher levels of educational attainment than those in public schools. They then examined the genetic differences between students in these groups, and surprisingly, there were differences in genetic markers between them. Interestingly, when differences in genetics were accounted for, educational attainment differences between students attending the different schools disappeared.

In another study, 2 van Dongen and colleagues examine the DNA methylation status of genes in people with different levels of educational attainment. They found differential sites of DNA methylation at specific regions (loci) correlate with educational attainment and the methylation status of these sites are largely influenced by environmental factors such as smoking. These sites of differential methylation were found to be located in and near genes with neuronal, immune and developmental functions. Differential levels of DNA methylation in these regions could impact the expression of these genes during critical periods of childhood development. Together, the two studies point to the role of genetics and epigenetic changes in educational outcome. Two accompanying perspective pieces, one by Nick Martin 3 and the other by Sue Thompson, 4 provide a commentary on the implications of these studies from the genetic 3 and educational 4 viewpoint.

There is a growing interest in genomic and epigenomic sequencing of different populations, with the data generated being incorporated into many different databases. Large-scale projects like the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Consortium, which is an international collaboration of research groups funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), and the British 100,000 genomes project, led by Genomics England, are leading the way in trying to understand how these factors influence biological processes. The two studies published in npj Science of Learning raise the question of the use of genomic data to help predict educational outcomes. Just as the management of our health is increasingly being found to be affected by genetic and epigenetic determinants, it may be that individuals progress through the education system based upon these factors as well.

Smith-Woolley, E. et al. Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them. npj Sci. Learn. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0019-8 (2018).

van Dongen, J. et al. DNA methylation signatures of educational attainment. npj Sci. Learn. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0020-2 (2018).

Martin, N. Getting to the genetic and environmental roots of educational inequality. npj Sci. Learn. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0021-1 (2018).

Thomson, S. Achievement at school and socioeconomic background—an educational perspective. npj Sci. Learn. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0022-0 (2018).

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Pankaj Sah & Jason Mattingley

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Michael Fanselow

School of Medicine, University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Gregory J. Quirk

Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

John Hattie

Applied Educational Research Center, Latin American School of Social Sciences, Harvard Extension School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

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P.S., M.F., G.J.Q., J.H., J.M. and T.T.E. contributed to the writing and editing of the manuscript.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau on nature, wholeness and education

Jean-jacques rousseau – wikipedia commons – pd, jean-jacques rousseau on nature, wholeness and education. his novel émile was the most significant book on education after plato’s republic, and his other work had a profound impact on political theory and practice, romanticism and the development of the novel. we explore jean-jacques rousseau’s life and contribution..

contents : introduction · life · nature, wholeness and romanticism · social contract and the general will · on education · on the development of the person · conclusion · further reading and references · links · how to cite this article

Why should those concerned with education study Rousseau? He had an unusual childhood with no formal education. He was a poor teacher. Apparently unable to bring up his own children, he committed them to orphanages soon after birth. At times he found living among people difficult, preferring the solitary life. What can such a man offer educators? The answer is that his work offers great insight. Drawing from a broad spectrum of traditions including botany, music and philosophy, his thinking has influenced subsequent generations of educational thinkers – and permeates the practice of informal educators. His book Émile was the most significant book on education after Plato’s Republic , and his other work had a profound impact on political theory and practice, romanticism and the development of the novel (Wokler 1995: 1).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was born in Geneva (June 28) but became famous as a ‘French’ political philosopher and educationalist. Rousseau was brought up first by his father (Issac) and an aunt (his mother died a few days after his birth), and later and by an uncle. He had happy memories of his childhood – although it had some odd features such as not being allowed to play with children his own age. His father taught him to read and helped him to appreciate the countryside. He increasingly turned to the latter for solace.

At the age of 13 he was apprenticed to an engraver. However, at 16 (in 1728) he left this trade to travel, but quickly become secretary and companion to Madame Louise de Warens. This relationship was unusual. Twelve years his senior she was in turns a mother figure, a friend and a lover. Under her patronage he developed a taste for music. He set himself up as a music teacher in Chambéry (1732) and began a period of intense self education. In 1740 he worked as a tutor to the two sons of M. de Mably in Lyon. It was not a very successful experience (nor were his other episodes of tutoring). In 1742 he moved to Paris. There he became a close friend of David Diderot, who was to commission him to write articles on music for the French Encyclopédie. Through the sponsorship of a number of society women he became the personal secretary to the French ambassador to Venice – a position from which he was quickly fired for not having the ability to put up with a boss whom he viewed as stupid and arrogant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to Paris in 1745 and earned a living as a music teacher and copyist. In the hotel where he was living (near the Sorbonne) he met Thérèse Lavasseur who worked as a seamstress. She was also, by a number of accounts, an odd figure. She was made fun of by many of those around here, and it was Rousseau’s defence of her that led to friendship. He believed she had a ‘pure and innocent heart’. They were soon living together (and they were to stay together, never officially married, until he died). She couldn’t read well, nor write, or add up – and Rousseau tried unsuccessfully over the years to teach her. According to his Confessions , Thérèse bore five children – all of whom were given to foundling homes (the first in 1746) (1996: 333). Voltaire later scurrilously claimed that Rousseau had dumped them on the doorstep of the orphanage. In fact the picture was rather more complex. Rousseau had argued the children would get a better upbringing in such an institution than he could offer. They would not have to put up with the deviousness of ‘high society’. Furthermore, he claimed he lacked the money to bring them up properly. There was also the question of his and Thérèse’s capacity to cope with child-rearing. Last, there is also some question as to whether all or any of the children were his (for example, Thérèse had an affair with James Boswell whilst he stayed with Rousseau). What we do know is that in later life Rousseau sought to justify his actions concerning the children (see, for example 1996: 345-346); declaring his sorrow about the way he had acted.

Diderot encouraged Rousseau to write and in 1750 he won first prize in an essay competition organized by the Académie de Dijon – Discours sur les sciences et les arts . ‘Why should we build our own happiness on the opinions of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?’ (1750: 29). In this essay we see a familiar theme: that humans are by nature good – and it is society’s institutions that corrupt them (Smith and Smith 1994: 184). The essay earned him considerable fame and he reacted against it. He seems to have fallen out with a number of his friends and the (high-society) people with whom he was expected to mix. This was a period of reappraisal. On a visit to Geneva Jean-Jacques Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism (and gained Genevan citizenship). There was also a fairly public infatuation with Mme d’Houderot that with his other erratic behaviour, led some of his friends to consider him insane.

Rousseau’s mental health was a matter of some concern for the rest of his life. There were significant periods when he found it difficult to be in the company of others, when he believed himself to be the focus of hostility and duplicity (a feeling probably compounded by the fact that there was some truth in this). He frequently acted ‘oddly’ with sudden changes of mood. These ‘oscillations’ led to situations where he falsely accused others and behaved with scant respect for their humanity. There was something about what, and the way, he wrote and how he acted with others that contributed to his being on the receiving end of strong, and sometimes malicious, attacks by people like Voltaire. The ‘oscillations’ could also open up ‘another universe’ in which he could see the world in a different, and illuminating, way (see Grimsley 1969).

At around the time of the publication of his famous very influential discourses on inequality and political economy in Encyclopedie (1755), Rousseau also began to fall out with Diderot and the Encyclopedists. The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg offered him (and Thérèse) a house on their estate at Montmorency (to the north of Paris).

During the next four years in the relative seclusion of Montmorency, Rousseau produced three major works: The New Heloise (1761), probably the most widely read novel of his day); The Social Contract (April 1762), one of the most influential books on political theory; and Émile (May 1762), a classic statement of education. The ‘heretical’ discussion of religion in Émile caused Rousseau problems with the Church in France. The book was burned in a number of places. Within a month Rousseau had to leave France for Switzerland – but was unable to go to Geneva after his citizenship was revoked as a result of the furore over the book. He ended up in Berne. In 1766 Jean-Jacques Rousseau went to England (first to Chiswick then Wootton Hall near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and later to Hume’s house in Buckingham Street , London) at the invitation of David Hume. True to form he fell out with Hume, accusing him of disloyalty (not fairly!) and displaying all the symptoms of paranoia. In 1767 he returned to France under a false name (Renou), although he had to wait until to 1770 to return officially. A condition of his return was his agreement not to publish his work. He continued writing, completing his Confessions and beginning private readings of it in 1770. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was banned from doing this by the police in 1771 following complaints by former friends such as Diderot and Madame d’Epinay – who featured in the work. The book was eventually published after his death in 1782.

Rousseau returned to copying music to make a living, working in the morning and walking and ‘botanizing’ in the afternoon. He continued to have mental health problems. His next major work was Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Dialogues , completed in 1776. In the next two years, before his death in 1778, Rousseau wrote the ten, classic, meditations of Reveries of the Solitary Walker . The book opens: ‘So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has with unanimous accord been cast out by all the rest’ (1979: 27). He appears to have come upon a period of some calm and serenity (France 1979: 9). At this time ‘he found respite only in solitude, the study of botany, and a romantically lyrical communion with nature’ (Wokler 1995: 15).

In 1778 he was in Ermenonville, just north of Paris, staying with the Marquis de Giradin. On July 2, following his usual early morning walk Jean-Jacques Rousseau died of apoplexy (a haemorrhage – some of his former friends claimed he committed suicide). He was buried on the estate (on a small picturesque island – Ile des Peupliers ). Later, in 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris (formerly the Church of Sainte Geneviève. The Pantheon was used to house the bodies of key figures of the French Revolution.) His remains were placed close by those of Voltaire, who had died in the same year as him.

Nature, wholeness and romanticism

Rousseau argued that we are inherently good, but we become corrupted by the evils of society. We are born good – and that is our natural state. In later life he wished to live a simple life, to be close to nature and to enjoy what it gives us – a concern said to have been fostered by his father. Through attending to nature we are more likely to live a life of virtue. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was interested in people being natural.

We are born capable of sensation and from birth are affected in diverse ways by the objects around us. As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we are inclined to seek or to avoid the objects which produce them: at first, because they are agreeable or disagreeable to us, later because we discover that they suit or do not suit us, and ultimately because of the judgements we pass on them by reference to the idea of happiness of perfection we get from reason. These inclinations extend and strengthen with the growth of sensibility and intelligence, but under the pressure of habit they are changed to some extent with our opinions. The inclinations before this change are what I call our nature. In my view everything ought to be in conformity with these original inclinations. ( Émile , Book 1 – translation by Boyd 1956: 13; see also, 1911 edition p. 7).

As Ronald Grimsley has written, ‘From the outset Rousseau had drawn inspiration from his own heart and found philosophical truth in the depth of his own being’ (1973: 135). His later writings, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker , show both his isolation and alienation, and some paths into happiness. ‘Everything is in constant flux on this earth, he writes (1979: 88):

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island Of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones. (Rousseau 1979: 88 – 89)

Rousseau’s is sometimes described as a romantic vision. ‘Romanticism’ is not an easy term to define – it is best approached as an overlapping set of ideas and values.

The ‘Romantic’ is said to favour the concrete over the abstract, variety over uniformity, the infinite over the finite,; nature over culture, convention and artifice; the organic over the mechanical; freedom over constraint, rules and limitations. In human terms it prefers the unique individual to the average person, the free creative genius to the prudent person of good sense, the particular community or nation to humanity at large. Mentally, the Romantics prefer feeling to thought, more specifically emotion to calculation; imagination to literal common sense, intuition to intellect. (Quinton 1996: 778)

In many respects Rousseau’s vision could be labelled as ‘green’. But with this comes a classic tension between the individual and society, solitude and association – and this is central to his work.

Social contract and the general will

Chapter 1 of his classic work on political theory The Social Contract (published in 1762) begins famously, ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’. It is an expression of his belief that we corrupted by society. The social contract he explores in the book involves people recognizing a collective ‘general will’. This general will is supposed to represent the common good or public interest – and it is something that each individual has a hand in making. All citizens should participate – and should be committed to the general good – even if it means acting against their private or personal interests. For example, we might support a political party that proposes to tax us heavily (as we have a large income) because we can see the benefit that this taxation can bring to all. To this extend, Rousseau believed that the good individual, or citizen, should not put their private ambitions first.

This way of living, he argued, can promote liberty and equality – and it arises out of, and fosters, a spirit of fraternity. The cry of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is familiar to us today through the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) – and the impact of the thinking and experiences of that time have had on political movements in many different parts of the world since. Just how the ‘general will’ comes about is unclear – and this has profound implications. If we are to put the general will over the individual or ‘particular’ will then there needs to be safeguards against the exploitation of individuals and minorities. Rousseau’s belief in liberty, equality and fraternity, and his emphasis on education (see below) may go some way in counteracting the dangers of the general will, but others have hijacked the notion so that the majority rules the minority – or indeed a minority a majority – it just depends who has the power to define or interpret the general will.

On education

The focus of Émile is upon the individual tuition of a boy/young man in line with the principles of ‘natural education’. This focus tends to be what is taken up by later commentators, yet Rousseau’s concern with the individual is balanced in some of his other writing with the need for public or national education. In A Discourse on Political Economy and Considerations for the Government of Poland we get a picture of public education undertaken in the interests of the community as a whole.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty. If there are laws for the age of maturity, there ought to be laws for infancy, teaching obedience to others: and as the reason of each man is not left to be the sole arbiter of his duties, government ought the less indiscriminately to abandon to the intelligence and prejudices of fathers the education of their children, as that education is of still greater importance to the State than to the fathers: for, according to the course of nature, the death of the father often deprives him of the final fruits of education; but his country sooner or later perceives its effects. Families dissolve but the State remains. (Rousseau 1755: 148-9)

‘Make the citizen good by training’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, ‘and everything else will follow’.

In Émile Rousseau drew on thinkers that had preceded him – for example, John Locke on teaching – but he was able to pull together strands into a coherent and comprehensive system – and by using the medium of the novel he was able to dramatize his ideas and reach a very wide audience. He made, it can be argued, the first comprehensive attempt to describe a system of education according to what he saw as ‘nature’ (Stewart and McCann 1967:28). It certainly stresses wholeness and harmony, and a concern for the person of the learner. Central to this was the idea that it was possible to preserve the ‘original perfect nature’ of the child, ‘by means of the careful control of his education and environment, based on an analysis of the different physical and psychological stages through which he passed from birth to maturity’ (ibid.). This was a fundamental point. Rousseau argued that the momentum for learning was provided by the growth of the person (nature) – and that what the educator needed to do was to facilitate opportunities for learning.

The focus on the environment, on the need to develop opportunities for new experiences and reflection, and on the dynamic provided by each person’s development remain very powerful ideas.

We’ll quickly list some of the key elements that we still see in his writing:

a view of children as very different to adults – as innocent, vulnerable, slow to mature – and entitled to freedom and happiness (Darling 1994: 6). In other words, children are naturally good.
the idea that people develop through various stages – and that different forms of education may be appropriate to each.
a guiding principle that what is to be learned should be determined by an understanding of the person’s nature at each stage of their development.
an appreciation that individuals vary within stages – and that education must as a result be individualized. ‘Every mind has its own form’
each and every child has some fundamental impulse to activity. Restlessness in time being replaced by curiosity; mental activity being a direct development of bodily activity.
the power of the environment in determining the success of educational encounters. It was crucial – as Dewey also recognized – that educators attend to the environment. The more they were able to control it – the more effective would be the education.
the controlling function of the educator – The child, Rousseau argues, should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his/her grasp. (This he sees as a fundamental principle).
the importance of developing ideas for ourselves, to make sense of the world in our own way. People must be encouraged to reason their way through to their own conclusions – they should not rely on the authority of the teacher. Thus, instead of being taught other people’s ideas, Émile is encouraged to draw his own conclusions from his own experience. What we know today as ‘discovery learning’ One example, Rousseau gives is of Émile breaking a window – only to find he gets cold because it is left unrepaired.
a concern for both public and individual education.

We could go on – all we want to do is to establish what a far reaching gift Rousseau gave. We may well disagree with various aspects of his scheme – but there can be no denying his impact then – and now. It may well be, as Darling (1994: 17) has argued, that the history of child-centred educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau.

On the development of the person

Rousseau believed it was possible to preserve the original nature of the child by careful control of his education and environment based on an analysis of the different physical and psychological stages through which he passed from birth to maturity (Stewart and McCann 1967). As we have seen he thought that momentum for learning was provided by growth of the person (nature).

In Émile, Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie (whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that flow from sex. ‘The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive’ (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think, to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable’ (Everyman edn.: 327). The stages below are those associated with males.

Stage 1: Infancy (birth to two years). The first stage is infancy, from birth to about two years. (Book I). Infancy finishes with the weaning of the child. He sets a number of maxims, the spirit of which is to give children ‘more real liberty and less power, to let them do more for themselves and demand less of others; so that by teaching them from the first to confine their wishes within the limits of their powers they will scarcely feel the want of whatever is not in their power’ (Everyman edn: 35).

The only habit the child should be allowed to acquire is to contract none… Prepare in good time form the reign of freedom and the exercise of his powers, by allowing his body its natural habits and accustoming him always to be his own master and follow the dictates of his will as soon as he has a will of his own. (Émile, Book 1 – translation by Boyd 1956: 23; Everyman edn: 30)

Stage 2: ‘The age of Nature’ (two to 12). The second stage, from two to ten or twelve, is ‘the age of Nature’. During this time, the child receives only a ‘negative education’: no moral instruction, no verbal learning. He sets out the most important rule of education: ‘Do not save time, but lose it… The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed’ (Everyman edn.: 57; Boyd: 41). The purpose of education at this stage is to develop physical qualities and particularly senses, but not minds. In the latter part of Book II, Rousseau describes the cultivation of each of Émile’s five senses in turn.

Stage 3: Pre-adolescence (12-15). Émile in Stage 3 is like the ‘noble savage’ Rousseau describes in The Social Contract. ‘About twelve or thirteen the child’s strength increases far more rapidly than his needs’ (Everyman edn.: 128). The urge for activity now takes a mental form; there is greater capacity for sustained attention (Boyd 1956: 69). The educator has to respond accordingly.

Our real teachers are experience and emotion, and man will never learn what befits a man except under its own conditions. A child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man’s estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his grasp. My whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education. (Everyman edn: 141; Boyd: 81)

The only book Émile is allowed is Robinson Crusoe – an expression of the solitary, self-sufficient man that Rousseau seeks to form (Boyd 1956: 69).

Stage 4: Puberty (15-20). Rousseau believes that by the time Émile is fifteen, his reason will be well developed, and he will then be able to deal with he sees as the dangerous emotions of adolescence, and with moral issues and religion. The second paragraph of the book contains the famous lines: ‘We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man’ (Everyman edn: 172). As before, he is still wanting to hold back societal pressures and influences so that the ‘natural inclinations’ of the person may emerge without undue corruption. There is to be a gradual entry into community life (Boyd 1956: 95). Most of Book IV deals with Émile’s moral development. (It also contains the the statement of Rousseau’s’ his own religious principles, written as ‘The creed of a Savoyard priest’, which caused him so much trouble with the religious authorities of the day).

Stage 5: Adulthood (20-25). In Book V, the adult Émile is introduced to his ideal partner, Sophie. He learns about love, and is ready to return to society, proof, Rousseau hopes, after such a lengthy preparation, against its corrupting influences. The final task of the tutor is to ‘instruct the the young couple in their marital rights and duties’ (Boyd 1956: 130).

Sophie . This last book includes a substantial section concerning the education of woman. Rousseau subscribes to a view that sex differences go deep (and are complementary) – and that education must take account of this. ‘The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; he one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance’ (Everyman edn: 322). Sophie’s training for womanhood upto the age of ten involves physical training for grace; the dressing of dolls leading to drawing, writing, counting and reading; and the prevention of idleness and indocility. After the age of ten there is a concern with adornment and the arts of pleasing; religion; and the training of reason. ‘She has been trained careful rather than strictly, and her taste has been followed rather than thwarted’ (Everyman edn: 356). Rousseau then goes on to sum her qualities as a result of this schooling (356-362).

Rousseau’s gift to later generations is extraordinarily rich – and problematic. Émile was the most influential work on education after Plato’s Republic, The Confessions were the most important work of autobiography since that of St Augustine (Wokler 1995: 1); The Reveries played a significant role in the development of romantic naturalism; and The Social Contract has provided radicals and revolutionaries with key themes since it was published. Yet Rousseau can be presented at the same time as deeply individualist, and as controlling and pandering to popularist totalitarianism. In psychology he looked to stage theory and essentialist notions concerning the sexes (both of which continue to plague us) yet did bring out the significance of difference and of the impact of the environment. In life he was difficult he was difficult to be around, and had problems relating to others, yet he gave glimpses of a rare connectedness.

Other references

Barry, B. (1967) “The Public Interest”, in Quinton, A. (ed.) Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bloom, A. (1991) ‘Introduction’ to Rousseau, J-J. (1762) Émile , London: Penguin.

Darling, J. (1994) Child-Centred Education and its Critics , London: Paul Chapman.

Dent, N.J.H. (1988) Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological, Social and Political Theory , Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Melzer, A.M. (1990) The Natural Goodness of Man: On the Sytem of Rousseau’s Thought , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, J. (1984) Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy , London: Yale University Press

Quinton, A. (1996) ‘Philosophical romanticism’ in T. Honderich (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Soëtard, , M. (1995) ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ in Z. Morsy (ed.) Thinkers on Education Volume 4 , Paris: UNESCO.

Stewart, W. A. C. and McCann, W. P. (1967) The Educational Innovators. Volume 1 1750–1880 , London: Macmillan.

Why not visit:

Rousseau Association – has useful articles plus a range of links. Includes page devote to Rousseau and education.

The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Museum

Project Gutenberg – download Jean-Jacques Rouseau’s Confessions.. and Emile

EpistemeLinks – full listing of full electronic texts

Acknowledgement : The picture of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is, we believe, in the public domain @ wikipedia commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rousseau.jpg

How to cite this article : Michele Erina Doyle and Mark K. Smith (2007-2013) ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau on education’, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rous.htm . Last update: January 07, 2013

Last Updated on April 24, 2024 by infed.org

Effects of Nature (Greenspace) on Cognitive Functioning in School Children and Adolescents: a Systematic Review

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Published: 19 March 2022
Volume 34 , pages 1217–1254, ( 2022 )

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Dianne A. Vella-Brodrick 1 &
Krystyna Gilowska 1

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There is growing interest in understanding the extent to which natural environments can influence learning particularly in school contexts. Nature has the potential to relieve cognitive overload, reduce stress and increase wellbeing—all factors that are conducive to learning. This paper provides a PRISMA-guided systematic review of the literature examining the effects of nature interventions on the cognitive functioning of young people aged 5 to 18 years. Examples of nature interventions include outdoor learning, green playgrounds, walks in nature, plants in classrooms and nature views from classroom windows. These can vary in duration and level of interaction (passive or active). Experimental and quasi-experimental studies with comparison groups that employed standardized cognitive measures were selected, yielding 12 studies from 11 papers. Included studies were rated as being of high (n = 10) or moderate quality (n = 2) and most involved short-term nature interventions. Results provide substantial support for cognitive benefits of nature interventions regarding selective attention, sustained attention and working memory. Underlying mechanisms for the benefits were also explored, including enhanced wellbeing, cognitive restoration and stress reduction—all likely to be contributors to the nature-cognition relationship. The cognitive effects of nature interventions were also examined according to age and school level with some differences evident. Findings from this systematic review show promise that providing young people with opportunities to connect with nature, particularly in educational settings, can be conducive to enhanced cognitive functioning. Schools are well placed to provide much needed ‘green’ educational settings and experiences to assist with relieving cognitive overload and stress and to optimize wellbeing and learning.

Short-Term Exposure to Nature and Benefits for Students’ Cognitive Performance: a Review

How Education Can Be Leveraged to Foster Adolescents’ Nature Connection

Do Experiences with Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-And-Effect Relationship

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

The pressure of modern-day westernized living involving technology, high-rise buildings, traffic congestion and pollution is taking a toll on society. These lifestyle changes have led to reduced opportunities for interacting with nature (Hartig et al., 2014 ) and a fast-paced lifestyle that can be psychologically draining. Subsequently health and well-being are compromised as evidenced by escalating rates of mental illness (Blake et al., 2018 ; Michaelson et al., 2020 ; Vancampfort et al., 2018 ). In an attempt to reduce fatigue and improve well-being, research attention has turned to the potential healing effects of nature (Capaldi et al, 2015 ; Diaz et al., 2015; Hartig et al., 2014 ).

Nature or natural environments are broadly defined as including living plants and animals, geological processes and weather. Nature exposure typically involves connecting with ‘green’ and ‘blue’ spaces including park land, forests, plants, the ocean and other natural waterways such as rivers and lakes. These can vary substantially in exposure time (from minutes to weeks and even years), as well as the extent to which nature is the core of the activity rather than simply in the background (Norwood et al., 2019 ). For example, nature interventions can include going for a walk amidst nature for 30 min, right through to creating a school garden which can last months or years. Multiple theories have been presented to explain the relationship between nature and different aspects of health. The Biophilia hypothesis (Urlich, 1983) posits that individuals are innately driven to affiliate with nature for survival and psychological restoration. When a connection with nature occurs, there is an opportunity for cognitive capacities to be relieved and well-being to be strengthened. The Attention Restoration Theory (ART; Kaplan, 1995 ) asserts that elements of the natural environment elicit a soft fascination from individuals that can release the need for relentless goal-directed attentional processes often associated with immersion in built environments and subsequently provides cognitive restoration. The Stress Reduction Theory (Ulrich, 1983 ; Ulrich et al., 1991 ) focuses on physiological responses to demonstrate that a reduction in stress induced by the natural environment can, in turn, enhance cognition. These theoretical perspectives offer a common theme of restoration through enhancing well-being by reducing mental fatigue or stress and are consistent with Wilson’s concept of ‘biophilia’ ( 1984 ). This suggests that exposure to nature can be helpful in learning environments where cognitive functioning is fundamental. It is the broad aim of this paper to undertake a systematic review of high-quality studies examining the effects of nature (greenspace) on the cognitive functioning of school children and adolescents. This will include a broad range of passive and active nature interventions, of varying duration, that are common in school settings. This will provide insights into whether specific theoretical perspectives are most relevant for particular types of interventions (e.g., short term or active).

There has been a keen interest in exploring the extent to which children and young people connect with nature, value nature and benefit from nature (e.g., Barrable & Booth, 2020 ; Roberts et al. ( 2020 ). This in part stems from concern about the rising rate of children growing up in urban environments and missing out on time spent outdoors in the natural environment (Weeland et al., 2019 ). Children have been identified as a population group with specific risks and needs relating to attention, self-regulation as well as physical and cognitive development (Roberts et al., 2020 ). The role of nature in assisting young people with these issues has preliminary empirical support, albeit with more diverse samples (Hartig et al, 2014 ) such as with older adults for memory enhancement (Astell-Burt & Feng, 2020 ). This has prompted interest in understanding how nature exposure can influence children’s cognitive development and learning particularly in school environments. For example, consistent with ART, it is plausible that exposure to nature can help children to replenish depleted cognitive resources resulting from information overload. An attraction to nature can trigger ‘soft’ (effortless) fascination, relieve fatigue and aid psychological replenishing. In support of this, van den Berg et al. ( 2016 ) found that university students and staff who viewed 40 images of natural and built scenes and rated these on complexity and restorative quality (fascination, beauty, relaxation and positive affect) recorded longer viewing times for the nature scenes—consistent with greater fascination with nature—and rated them as more restorative than built scenes.

Most of the empirical studies on nature are correlational designs. For example, Flouri (2019) examined the relationship between neighborhood greenspace and spatial working memory for 4,758 children aged 11 years living in urban areas of England. They found that less neighborhood greenspace (measured by satellite imagery) was related to poorer spatial working memory for these children. A study by Li et al., ( 2019 ) examined the relationship between tree cover density proximal to schools and academic performance for 624 high school students. They found that tree cover density in school surroundings was positively associated with academic performance (measured using Illinois Report Cards, American College Test scores and graduation rates). A study including 101 public high schools in Michigan examined whether nature exposure—nature views from school buildings, vegetation levels on campus and the potential for students to access this vegetation—was positively related to academic performance (e.g., Educational Assessment Program test and graduation rates) and inversely related to antisocial behaviors (Matsuoka, 2010 ). They found that landscapes of mowed grass and parking lots were associated with poorer student performance, whereas landscapes composed primarily of trees and shrubs were correlated with favorable academic performance. With few exceptions (e.g., Markevych et al., 2019 ), the majority of studies have found a positive relationship between nature exposure and cognitive functioning for children. In addition, learning in greenspace or viewing nature from a classroom has also been associated with reduced heart rate and cortisol levels (Dettweiler et al., 2017 ; Li & Sullivan, 2016 ). These favorable findings also extend to longitudinal studies whereby greater exposure to residential surrounding greenspace over one’s life, particularly in childhood, was associated with enhanced cognitive functioning and brain density (e.g., Dadvand et al., 2015 ).

A limitation of correlational studies is that causal relationships cannot be established, nor do they enable a clear understanding of the factors that influence the beneficial effects of nature on cognitive functioning. Kuo et al. ( 2019 ) examined some of these influential factors for enhancing cognitive functioning in learning environments and identified improved self-discipline, heightened motivation, enjoyment and engagement, as well as increased physical activity and fitness. They also noted some indirect effects of nature on learners such as the calm, quiet and safe contexts often associated with nature, which then facilitate warmer and cooperative social interactions and self-directed creative play. They also proposed the notion of a synergistic effect of the numerous processes underlying the nature-learning connection. For example, nature can simultaneously increase concentration, engagement and self-discipline to enhance learning. Although Kuo et al., ( 2019 ) provide (limited) empirical support for each of these processes, they note concerns relating to the poor-quality studies and over-generalization of results in this field.

The interest of this systematic review lies in the population of school children and since this group spans a long time period, it is important to examine how nature affects children at all stages of their development. Neighborhood greenness can play an important role in cognitive development starting from the very early stages of life (Dadvand et al., 2018 ; Liao et al., 2019 ) and continuing through to later stages of childhood (Flouri, et al., 2019 ; Lee, et al., 2019 ). Dadvand et al. ( 2018 ) reported long-term exposure to greenness early in child development to be associated with beneficial structural changes in the brain. Liao et al. ( 2019 ) observed that exposure to neighborhood greenspace is associated with better early childhood neurodevelopment for those up to 2 years of age including prenatals. Mason et.al. (2021) examined the impact of short-term (from 10 to 90 min) passive nature exposure on cognitive functioning in primary, secondary and tertiary students. They found that 12 out of 14 studies reported restorative effects of greenspace for attention and working memory for all education sectors. The authors suggest that different mechanisms may be involved in long-term nature exposures, and hence, this distinction warrants further investigation.

Some researchers have examined age differences in the relationship between greenspace and cognitive functioning. For example, Lee, et al., (2019) included 6–18 year old children in their study and found that both the younger and older groups showed inverse relationship with greenness and attention problems, indicating that nature may benefit children throughout their development. In a longitudinal study, Reuben et al. ( 2019 ) observed associations between greenspace exposure and cognitive performance across all ages. Children were assessed on fluid and crystalized intellectual performance at ages 5, 12 and 18. After adjusting for socioeconomic status, greenspace exposure predicted longitudinal benefits for fluid cognitive ability among 5 year-old children. These findings add to the body of research on the importance of nature in early brain development.

Experimental studies with children are emerging but these generally have weak study designs, include short-term nature exposure, or focus on specific samples. For example, a within sample study comprised 17 students aged 7–12 years diagnosed with ADHD (Faber et al., 2009). Each student completed three walks, one week apart (and in random order). One walk was in a city park and the other two walks in well-kept urban locations (downtown and neighborhood). Performance on a Digit Span Backward task was found to be better after the park walk relative to the urban walks. These results are promising, but the extent to which these findings apply to general student populations is unknown. More recently, reviews and meta-analyses on the effects of nature on desirable psychological and health outcomes have been published and include mostly randomized controlled trials with general samples (Stevenson, et al., 2018 ), including those with samples of children and adolescents (Mygind et al., 2019 ; Roberts et al., 2020 ). For example, a systematic review by Vanaken and Danckaerts ( 2018 ) included 21 studies examining the impact of greenspace on children and adolescents’ mental health. They concluded that the evidence is consistent in demonstrating the favorable influence of exposure to greenspace on emotional and behavioral issues such as inattention and hyperactivity. A mini review of nature connection interventions for children was also published with the aim of identifying themes and trends (Barrable & Booth, 2020 ). The authors also noted poor study quality and they proposed guidelines for future work to strengthen the quality of evidence collected by researchers.

Some age differences in level of nature connection have been reported between younger children (10–12 years) compared with adolescents (13–15 years), with younger age groups reporting higher levels (Braun & Dierkes, 2017 ). However, no firm conclusions can be drawn as work examining nature exposure and cognitive outcomes with children is scarce. More research is needed to collate the findings from well-designed experimental studies to better understand the effects of nature on children and adolescents’ cognitive capacity in school settings and their underlying mechanisms.

The main purpose of this review is to examine evidence of a causal relationship of nature exposure on cognitive functioning for the population of school children and adolescents in a variety of settings. Specifically, we review studies of diverse time exposures, from a few minutes to months and years, to capture any short-term benefits for attentional processes, as well as those for longer-term benefits like academic performance. Therefore, our definition of nature exposure was intentionally broad and could include activities where nature plays a background role, like passive viewing of the natural environment while sitting in a classroom or walking in a park or it might include activities where nature plays an active role like in outdoor gardening lessons.

More specifically this review will: (1) systematically evaluate the recent body of experimental and quasi-experimental studies examining the effects of nature (greenspace) on cognitive functioning in children and adolescents; (2) investigate the underlying processes involved in possible effects of nature on cognitive performance as well as consider the adequacy of different theoretical models to explain any effects; and (3) examine whether the effects of nature exposure differ according to age. We will also explore the duration and type of nature intervention (active or passive) to determine whether these intervention characteristics influence outcomes.

Literature Search and Eligibility Criteria

An a priori protocol was designed and registered with PROSPERO (registration number: CRD42021214826). The checklist of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was applied to guide the systematic review process and began with the PICOS process to develop our main research question and to determine appropriate search terms. A PICOS structured question was formulated based on the population, intervention and outcome of interest and was: What are the effects of nature (greenspace) on cognitive functioning for school aged children and adolescents? Key components included nature exposure interventions examining cognitive outcomes, focus on school aged children, and the inclusion of high-quality studies employing experimental and quasi experimental research designs. For each component, relevant search terms were identified and then converted to keywords (see Table 1 ). The various search queries were based on a combination of keywords.

Three types of keywords targeted papers on nature or greenspace environment combined with cognitive outcomes, and school children population. An example of a search for the Effect of Nature on Cognitive Processes in School Children in Scopus is: ((TITLE-ABS-KEY (“school environment” OR child* OR “school landscape*” OR childhood OR pupil* OR "high-school student*")) AND (TITLE-ABS-KEY (“green break” OR “green area” OR “view* of nature” OR “nature exposure” OR “nature walk” OR “exposure* to nature” OR outdoor* OR greening OR greenspace OR greenness))) AND (TITLE-ABS-KEY (“restorative effect” OR “psychological recovery” OR “effect* on attention” OR “executive function*”OR “cognitive restoration” OR attention* OR cognitive OR "mental fatigue")).

Study selection criteria were: (a) the research study was written in English; (b) the study design was experimental or quasi experimental (e.g., participants or class of students randomly assigned to a group, pre- and post-assessments, comparison group or controlled trials); (c) exposure to nature included parks, school playgrounds, neighborhood green areas, nature views from the window or inclusion of plants inside a room; (d) nature exposure was based on expert assessment or described in detail and/or a picture was provided and/or validated questionnaire methods; (e) the study reported a measure of cognitive functioning using standardized instruments (academic records, cognitive performance tests); (f) the study focused on school children and adolescents between 5 to 18 years of age; (g) no restriction on publication date was given. Studies were excluded if they: (a) were descriptive, observational, or a case study with no pre-/post-treatment design; (b) did not include an objective description of greenspace, or, in case of a subjective description, if there was no standardized or expert assessment of greenspace; (c) focused on children during the prenatal period or pre-school children.

The initial database searches were conducted between March and May, 2020 and updated regularly with the final update in May 2021. They were run on ELSEVIER and EBSCOhost engines through the following databases: Scopus, PubMed, Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Complete, Education Research Complete, ERIC, SocINDEX with Full Text and Urban Studies Abstracts. A total of 1393 journal papers were found, as presented in Fig. 1 . In addition to the database searches, an ancestry search that checked reference lists of key papers, and a hand search of relevant journals and grey literature were also conducted to ensure all relevant works, including unpublished but publicly available works and dissertations were included in the review. Four additional studies were identified based on reference lists of key papers. All duplicates were removed, which reduced the results to 1235.

PRISMA flow diagram

The screening process started with removing irrelevant papers. Articles were first excluded based on titles (n = 1115), and the remaining articles were screened based on abstracts. Subsequently, the title-abstract screening process resulted in 51 articles to go through to the next stage of full-article review. The full texts of the remaining studies were carefully evaluated by both authors according to the exclusion–inclusion criteria. Eleven papers comprising 12 studies were selected for the systematic review. Reasons for the exclusions are presented in the PRISMA flowchart (Fig. 1 ).

The following information was extracted from the selected studies: author, year of publication, country, research focus or question, theoretical model, sample, measures, study design, intervention/comparison group and findings. See Table 2 .

Quality Appraisal of Studies

An appraisal of the quality of studies to be included in the review was based on the Effective Public Health Practice Project Quality Assessment Tool (EPHPP) for Quantitative Studies ( 2010 ). The EPHPP has been shown to have robust psychometric properties and is suitable for systematic reviews of effectiveness (Deeks et al., 2003 ; Jackson & Waters, 2005 ; Thomas et al., 2004 ). The EPHPP assesses study quality in six domains (selection bias, study design, confounders, blinding, data collection methods, withdrawals and dropouts), which can be rated as strong (1 point), moderate (2 points) or weak (3 points) according to a standardized guide and dictionary. The overall rating of study quality can also be classified as strong, moderate, or weak by averaging the scores for the six domain ratings. The two authors independently appraised the quality of each study by using the checklists included in the EPHPP manual. In the occasional case of differing ratings between the reviewers, each explained their reasons for their selection and then for any remaining discrepancies, scores were averaged across the two raters.

Study Characteristics

A total of 12 studies from 11 journal articles were selected for inclusion in the review. All studies were published between 2014 and 2019 and came mainly from Europe (75%). Two were from the USA and one study came from Canada. As presented in Table 2 , the studies selected were all experimental or quasi experimental designs but varied in terms of population characteristics, the nature intervention examined and the methods used to assess cognitive outcomes.

Study designs included three randomized and three semi-randomized controlled trials, with most of them being between-subject designs and one a semi-randomized study adopting a within-subject design. The remaining studies were quasi-experimental (within-subject = 3, between-subject = 3). A variety of statistical analyses were applied across studies, including ANOVA, ANCOVA, t-tests and F statistics. Sample sizes were generally adequate but varied substantially across studies ranging from 33 to 3,061 participants. The methodological quality of the studies was assessed as outlined in the method section. Table 3 shows the quality ratings according to each domain of assessment and a global quality rating and classification for each study.

Ratings indicate 83% (10/12) of the studies received a classification of strong (falling within the 1.0–1.50 range) and 17% (2/12) received ratings of moderate (falling within the range of 1.51–2.50). None of the studies received a “low” classification. This signifies that the studies included in this review were generally of a high standard. The quality of studies was also examined within the specific scoring domains and revealed a tendency of bias to occur mostly in the Study Design and Blinding domains. The remaining four domains, namely the Selection Bias, Confounders, Data Collection and Withdrawals and Dropouts, have been rated as predominantly strong or having negligible chance of bias.

Study populations of the reviewed studies included children and adolescents of different age groups. Four of the studies included high-school students aged 16–18 years, and one study included groups of younger adolescents aged 13–15. School children aged 10–12 were recruited in four studies, and one study comprised a diverse group of adolescents aged between 8–15. The two remaining studies represented the youngest age group, one with participants ranging from 7 to 10 years, and the other, between 6 and 12 years. All studies included male and female participants, and overall, there was a reasonable balance of male and female participants across the selected studies.

Collectively, the selected studies operationalized nature interventions as including a variety of natural environments such as school playgrounds, parks, woodlands, school greenery and indoor environments with plants. The interventions differed in time duration, level of social and physical engagement and degree of greenery involved. Table 2 summarizes the types of nature interventions and the comparison activities used in the selected studies. In terms of time duration of interventions, eight studies used short-term nature exposures (from a few to 60 min), while four studies included long-term exposures in their designs (from 2 months to 2 years).

Various cognitive tests have been used in the selected studies as the outcome variable to capture the possible effects of nature on cognitive functioning. They represent two major groups of tests—attention tests (n = 9) and long-term memory knowledge tests (n = 2). Attention tests can be further distinguished on the basis of the cognitive domain they are mainly designed to capture, even though the cognitive domains often overlap in a test. There are four main types of attention tests evident from the selected studies: (1) working memory tests, like Digit Span Backward, demanding ability to hold and manipulate information in the short-term; (2) selective attention tests, like the Fish Flanker Task, which requires the participant to direct attention to the task while simultaneously ignoring distractors; (3) processing speed test, like the Digit Letter Substitution Test, the main goal of which is to process as many items as possible in limited time periods; (4) and the Go/No-Go test intended to measure impulse control (see Appendix Table 7 ).

Effectiveness of the Nature Interventions

Studies included in this review enabled us to investigate nature interventions on cognitive functioning across different attentional domains as well as on long-term memory knowledge acquisition. First, we will present the findings from the attention tests in four sections: (1) working memory tests, (2) selective attention tests also including tests with varying degrees of sustained/selective attention tests, (3) processing speed and (4) impulse control tests. Then we will present the findings from the long-term memory knowledge tests.

Attention Tests

Most studies in our review applied short-term nature exposures to find possible causal effects on attentional processing. These studies were more consistently able to report attentional processing benefits than studies that used long-term nature exposures in their designs.

Working Memory

Two studies (Amicone et al., 2018 ; Li & Sullivan, 2016 ) found a significant positive effect of nature on working memory performance in middle-class public school children in Rome and in both urban and rural high-school students in central Illinois public schools, respectively. Both studies used Digit Span Forward and Digit Span Backward, but the tasks differed on whether participants were to write the digits down (Amicone et al., 2018 ) or to repeat them verbally (Li & Sullivan, 2016 ). The Rome study used 30 min active play in a green school playground, while the Illinois study used a window view onto green landscape with two examiners in the room where the participants were seated and resting for 10 min. These studies indicate that relative to control conditions, two different nature interventions (one immersive and one passive) involving different age groups can improve cognitive performance that relies on the ability to hold and manipulate information in short-term (working) memory.

Selective Attention and Sustained/Selective Attention

The main common task in tests designed to measure selective attention is to direct attention towards a target while simultaneously ignoring distractors. Most studies (n = 9) in our systematic review have been designed to measure selective attention; however, they have used five different tests for this purpose. In particular, Combined Attention Systems Test (CAST) and the Attention Network Task (ANT) tests are similar measures based on the fish tanker test where the target fish is presented facing left or right and flanked by other fish pointing in congruent or incongruent directions, as a cue or distractor. The task requires respondents to indicate the correct direction of the target fish. Other tests like the Necker Task are also used as measures of selective attention but are notably dependent on visual processing. Likewise, The Sky Search and D-2R tests also rely on visual resources to sustain attention. Hence, caution is required when explaining the causal effect of nature on selective attention as visual processing can be a confounding factor.

Two studies (Johnson et al., 2019 and Stevenson et al., 2019 ) using similar computer attention tests based on the fish flanker task, reported a significant positive effect on selective attention performance after a 30-min walk in a natural environment with trees. Johnson et al. ( 2019 ) found a small positive effect with Canadian children of mixed age between 8 to 15 years old after walking through a forested trail in Shrubie Park. Stevenson et al. ( 2019 ) found a positive effect for speed and stability of responses, in children aged 10–14 years recruited from an independent school in Denmark, after walking through rolling grass fields with young pine trees and rocks, farmland and forest. However, no improvement in executive attention was found in this study.

Two studies (Amicone et al., 2018 , studies 1 & 2) found natural environments, designed as structured green playtime and free play in a school garden respectively, exert a significant positive effect on attention control as measured by the Bells Test in primary public school middle-class children in Rome. The Bells test contains four different sheets with small black drawings of different symbols and the task requires respondents to mark all 35 bells embedded within 280 different distracting symbols. The test is relevant to selective attention control but also requires visual scanning. Greenwood and Gatersleben, ( 2016 ) also found a positive significant effect on selective attention for high school students of South West London after spending time in the school grassed area with trees, shrubs and flowers for 20 min. They used the Necker Cube Pattern Control Task to measure attention control.

Impulse Control

One study used an impulse control attention test, as measured by Go/No-Go task, to investigate impulse control after green structured play (Amicone et al., 2018 ). They found no significant positive effect in middle-class public school children in Rome after playtime in a school garden compared with a built playground.

Regarding Sustained/Selective Attention, four studies reported mixed findings derived from the D2-R—Letter Cancellation Task and Sky Search attention tests. The tests are used to measure selective attention but at the same time they require sustained attention for performance. Each test, respectively, presents rows of similar pictures or letters for the participants to visually scan to spot differences. Nature, designed as the living plants classroom wall, has been found to have a significantly positive effect on sustained/selective attention as measured by the Sky Task (van den Berg et al., 2017 ) in Dutch primary school children. However, the same attention test used in a longitudinal study by van Dijk-Wesselius et al. ( 2018 ), for a similar population in the Netherlands, did not yield significant results until after two years of green schoolyard exposure at the second follow-up, reporting only a positive trend at the first follow-up. These two studies differ from previous research in their aim to explore the effects of long-term nature exposures on cognition, rather than short-term ones.

Similar to the long-term studies, Sustained/Selective Attention, as measured by the D2-R—Letter Cancellation Task, was not found to be consistently and positively influenced by short-term nature exposure, indicating that perhaps this cognitive domain may not necessarily benefit from exposure to greenspace, irrespective of the duration of exposure. One study (Wallner et al., 2018 ) reported a significant positive effect after a 60-min break in a green park or forest relative to a small urban park in high school students in Vienna, but no effect was found in younger affluent Danish children 10–12 years old, after being exposed to a grassed area with trees compared with a classroom environment while reading quietly for 60 min (Mygind et al., 2018 ).

Processing Speed

Mixed findings have also been reported for long-term nature exposure studies examining processing speed as measured by the Digit Letter Substitution test (van Dijk-Wesselius et al., 2018 ; van den Berg et al., 2017 ). For the task participants were instructed to convert randomly ordered digits to letters according to a key and to do so within short periods of time. No significant positive effect was found on processing speed in the living plants classroom wall exposure study in Dutch primary school children (van den Berg et al., 2017 ). However, a significant positive effect was reported in the Greening of School study in Dutch school children aged 7–11 years (van Dijk-Wesselius et al., 2018 ). Again, these findings may reflect true inconsistency of nature exposure on processing speed, or the difficulty in establishing causal effect for long-term exposure studies.

Long-term Memory—Knowledge Acquisition

Only two studies in our review applied long-term nature exposures to find possible causal effects on long-term knowledge acquisition, and they were inconsistent in their ability to produce favorable outcomes. Wells et al. ( 2015 ) found school gardens to be beneficial for enhanced science knowledge, as compared to classes with no garden intervention in American children aged 6–12 years from low-income rural, suburban and urban schools. In addition to the “knowledge of plant science and nutritional science test,” they also measured the degree of intervention fidelity, which provided dose-based data to further support the findings. Accordingly, classes that reported the greatest increases in their science knowledge, by 0.78 on average, were the ones receiving higher dosages of the garden intervention.

Fägerstam and Blom ( 2013 ) compared outdoor with indoor learning in an urban high school environment with a traditional curriculum. They measured long-term knowledge acquisition by an essay-type question examining the biology course content, (i.e., on knowledge of ecology and classification), and further assessed the academic outcomes by a semi-structured interview. They found greater long-term knowledge retention for outdoor compared with indoor classes for 7th graders. However, no significant effects of nature were found for 8th graders. Additional interview data analysis revealed that, overall, intervention participants reported more vivid descriptions of class activities, which were interpreted as coming from higher positive emotional involvement.

Underlying Mechanisms

The second aim of this review is to investigate potential underlying mechanisms of the nature-cognitive performance relationship. Studies designed to demonstrate the effect of nature on cognitive functioning can also provide additional support for the foundational theories and can help to illuminate underlying mechanisms. These studies may also report beneficial effects of nature on some aspects of well-being that could function as mediators for enhanced cognitive outcomes. However, a full analysis of how nature produces beneficial effects would require more targeted and comprehensive work addressing a broad range of mediators to propose a theory. None of our studies have fully investigated the nature-cognition mechanisms specifically in relation to structured physical activity and social interactions; therefore, with regard to our second goal, we take an exploratory approach.

Our systematic review has captured studies that represent three types of theoretical perspectives, each of which proposes a distinctive but complementary explanation for why nature could benefit cognitive functioning and uses a corresponding measurement approach from which to examine the specific theory (see Tables 4 , 5 and 6 ). Thus, different psychological scales and physiological instruments have been employed in the selected studies to uncover possible underlying mechanisms for the beneficial effects of nature.

In this systematic review some studies reporting positive findings point to perceived restorativeness as an explanation, typically assessed either by the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS) or a self-assessed question/questions. For example, Amicone et al., ( 2018 ) in studies 1 and 2 reported beneficial findings and noted that children perceived natural environments to be more restorative as measured by the Perceived Restorativeness Scale. This finding supports the restorative process of nature exposure, particularly when contrasted with immersion in the built environment. Consistent with ART, these two studies demonstrated that restorative processes can occur in nature irrespective of how children choose to engage with it, whether in a structured game or free-play.

Stevenson et al. ( 2019 ) reported faster and more stable responses on the Attention Network Task after a green walk relative to an urban walk. They did not however, find any significant difference on executive (goal-directed) performance which is central to ART. Stevenson et al. also used a mobile eye-tracker instrument to measure distribution of eye gaze during exposures. Although for only a small sample, they provided some support for ART reporting higher rates of eye gazing during a nature walk compared to an urban walk, they proposed that through the soft fascination element of nature, participants were visually engaged and wanted to explore the scenery, hence the higher rates of eye-gazing, and, presumably, higher levels of restoration.

Johnson et al., ( 2019 ) provide support for ART by demonstrating a small but significant improvement on executive attention (referred to as endogenous), measured by CAST. This study found that a walk in a natural environment provided elements needed for restoration of goal-directed attention compared with a walk in an urban environment, however, this study did not include a measure of restoration. No additional support for ART was evident from the study by van den Berg et al., ( 2017 ). They provided results on self-reported ability to concentrate as well as on emotional, cognitive and social well-being. These additional measures were administered to provide insights into the effects of a green wall in the classroom on sustained/selective processing, as measured by the Sky Search task. Although they found a significant positive effect for selective attention, no underlying mechanism could be suggested since no difference between the groups with and without a green wall was found on self-reported concentration or on well-being. The study intervention involved long-term exposure and was complex in its design. It was mixed with short-term exposure which in itself may not have been effective (i.e., resting with eyes closed for the control group might be more restful than looking at the green wall for the experimental group). Thus, the short-term effect could have interfered with the long-term exposure to the green wall. In sum it would seem that the underlying mechanisms of ART theory were best demonstrated by the studies using short-term nature exposures when mental restoration was needed.

The remaining studies come from research perspectives associated with different pathways as possible mechanisms for the restorative effect of nature on cognitive processes. They propose that other mechanisms apart from mental fatigue restoration could include stress and affect. One of these studies (Li & Sullivan, 2016 ) provided additional results on self-reported subjective attention and stress, measured by a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), as well as measures on objective stress, including blood volume pulse, electrocardiography, skin conductance and body temperature. All the data were entered into regression models to provide further insight on possible factors at play to explain their main finding, that is, the effect of a green view on working memory, as measured by digit span tests. Since the analysis revealed no correlation between attention and stress changes, Li and Sullivan ( 2016 ) proposed that nature exposure was likely to have a direct impact on working memory performance rather than through the effect of a stress pathway. This study used only 10 min of exposure time, adding to the body of evidence on nature restorative capacities for attentional processes.

Wallner et al., ( 2018 ) explored psychological dimensions of well-being for positive effects of greenspaces on concentration performance measured by the D2-R test. They adopted the scale (Nitsch, 1976 ), which is designed to measure motivation and strain attributes for six categories (recuperation, tension/relaxation, state of mood, readiness for action, readiness for exertion, and alertness) of the Self-Condition Scale. They investigated how motivation and strain could help to explain their main findings and found that large greenspaces resulted in greater cognitive performance alongside several psychological dimensions of recuperation, tension/relaxation, mood state, readiness for action, and readiness for exertion. These dimensions are indicative of a higher degree of restorativeness, as well as psychological and physiological calming. Hence, these may be mediating factors for the effect of nature on cognition, suggesting that the key theories may be inter-connected.

Greenwood and Gatersleben ( 2016 ) reported improvement in concentration, as measured by the Necker Cube Pattern Control Task in a natural environment versus an indoor room, in three additional contexts for each condition, being alone, alone with a mobile phone, and being with a friend. They used Zuckerman's ( 1977 ) Inventory of Personal Reactions (ZIPERS) as their measure of positive affect, attentiveness, fear, sadness and anger to support their findings, and included objectively measured stress for this purpose as well. They reported a significant interaction effect for positive affect in a natural environment compared with an indoor room. This supports a biophilic response whereby nature feels both good and familiar. In addition, Greenwood and Gatersleben ( 2016 ) analyzed the role of social relations in the nature-cognition relationship. They concluded that even though improvements on the Necker Cube Pattern Control Task were observed across all contexts in the natural environment, for this particular age group of 16–18 year olds, nature appears to be especially restorative if it is undertaken with friends.

The social aspect is also a possible mediator in a longitudinal study on greening a schoolyard (van Dijk-Wesselius et al., 2018 ). In the second follow-up, after two years of exposure to a green schoolyard, children reported scoring significantly better on sustained/selective attention and processing speed compared to children with paved schoolyards. Self-reported questionnaires on aspects of well-being were also analyzed alongside the main results and a green schoolyard was found to benefit social well-being. By comparison, no improvements on emotional well-being were found. Children’s appreciation of the green schoolyard was suggested as an additional possible mediating factor, perhaps pointing to natural order and beauty as playing a bigger role than just purely aesthetic. As it is usually difficult to establish a direct effect of long-term nature exposure on cognitive functioning, many possible indirect mediators are possible.

Mygind et al. ( 2018 ) investigated the impact of nature on cognition in terms of the Stress Reduction Theory (Ulrich, 1983 ). They used tonic and phasic cardiac vagal tone for this purpose. Tonic vagal tone enables the modulation of the vagus nerve which fosters a calming effect on heart rate during rest and is linked with greater adaptability to external factors (Mygind et al., 2018 ). As predicted, they found that tonic vagal tone (but not event or phasic vagal tone) was higher in the natural environment than in indoor classrooms, but no significant difference was observed on the D2-R attention test in these two conditions. This increase in tonic vagal tone may lend some weight to the SRT.

Finally, the two remaining studies in our review (Fägerstam & Blom, 2013 ; Wells et al., 2015 ) align with the outdoor learning perspective—a body of research that mainly focuses on long-term knowledge acquisition rather than attentional functioning (Becker et al., 2017 ). Depending on the specific theory prescribing outdoor learning, studies may either attempt to explain psychological/physiological internal processes during learning out in nature or be more practical and explain in detail what aspects of the intervention appear to be most effective.

Wells et al. ( 2015 ) examined the effects of a school garden intervention on science knowledge, specifically on nutrition and plant science. A significant effect of garden lessons relative to indoor lessons, on science knowledge was found especially for interventions with high garden intervention fidelity. Fidelity was examined to provide details about how specific aspects of garden learning interventions contribute to the program’s success. Wells et al. ( 2015 ) found that higher intervention fidelity involved greater dosage of outdoor garden classes as well as having more success at growing and sharing fruits and vegetables. However, the study did not provide sufficient empirical evidence on underlying mechanisms such as how longer exposure to garden lessons might affect knowledge acquisition. Another outdoor learning study (Fägerstam & Blom, 2013 ) investigated children’s internal thoughts and emotions about the intervention using interviews, to further explain the main findings. The outdoor group described their outdoor lessons more clearly, used content-related words and showed more enthusiastic and participatory behavior compared with the indoor group. However, only children in Year 7, and not Year 8, demonstrated a significant improvement in their content knowledge, as measured by the biology essay-type questions. Hence, there is some uncertainty about how, or if, children’s emotions might contribute to the nature-cognition relationship and the significance of age on this relationship.

In sum, it would seem that the nature studies included in this review support a multitude of underlying factors influencing the nature-cognition relationship. However, the restorative factor is the one that has been most commonly tested with the use of specific self-report restoration measures such as the Perceived Restorativeness Scale. It is noteworthy however, that this measure includes items assessing dimensions such as relief from daily stressors and strains, feeling relaxed, free movement and curiosity. Hence, restoration can extend beyond cognitive relief to also include physical and psychological aspects. In particular, the increased physical activity and social interaction typically associated with outdoor learning may also be influencing factors (Becker et al., 2017). This lends weight to the possibility that multiple underlying factors might be at play potentially producing a synergistic impact as suggested by Kuo et al., ( 2019 ).

Effects of Nature interventions and the Influence of Age

The third aim of our review was to investigate possible differences of nature exposure effects on cognitive functioning for children of different age groups. Greenspace exposure does not seem to differentially effect child and adolescent cognitive functioning as it is generally beneficial for all age groups covered in this review. For high school students, however, the effect of greenspace on attentional functioning is found more consistently (Greenwood & Gatersleben, 2016 ; Li & Sullivan, 2016 ; Wallner et al., 2018 ) indicating that older children can benefit from a variety of nature interventions irrespective of whether it is a window view of nature, a walk in a park, or spending time playing in nature. These studies have shown that working memory, as well as selective and sustained attention, improve for high school students after green exposure, compared with urban exposures. For long-term knowledge acquisition the effect of nature produces mixed results with this older age group. Fägerstam and Blom ( 2013 ) found that outdoor lessons can improve students’ knowledge retention on biology for a seventh grade group but not for the eighth graders. Wells et al., ( 2015 ) found that across a diverse age range (6–12 years) experiential garden-based lessons on nutrition, horticulture and plant science resulted in significantly better knowledge retention assessed using a multiple-choice test, relative to those who completed classroom-based lessons.

Similar patterns for attentional functioning have been found in other age groups. For younger, mostly secondary school children, there is evidence that children can benefit from nature exposure in terms of working memory as well as selected and sustained attention (Amicone et al., 2018 ; Johnson et al., 2019 ; Stevenson et al., 2019 ) after a walk or play in a natural compared with urban environment. The remaining studies focusing on secondary school children (Amicone et al., 2018 ; Mygind et al., 2018 ) examined two additional attentional domains, namely, impulse control and selective/sustained attention, with an emphasis on visual scanning and processing speed, as measured by the Go/No-Go and D2-R tests, respectively. No observed significant positive effects of nature exposure were found in these studies. Finally, for the youngest group of school children (aged 7–12 years), nature exposure does not show similar patterns of effect in cognitive functioning as for middle and high school children. Had there been more experimental studies focusing on young children, perhaps a pattern could be established. Wells et al., ( 2015 ) have provided evidence that 6–12 year old children can benefit from a school garden intervention in terms of long-term knowledge retention on plant and nutritional science compared to children with no garden activity lessons. This finding adds to the body of research in nature exposure on long-term memory retention, but further work is needed since mixed results have been reported for older groups of children. With respect to attentional processes in young children, the effect of nature exposure on selective/sustained attention and information processing speed has produced mixed results (van den Berg et al., 2017 ; van Dijk-Wesselius et al., 2018 ).

Study duration

As can be seen from Appendix Table 8 , most interventions used in the studies reviewed were of a short duration and focused on attentional functioning as an outcome. Five studies used immediate post-intervention designs with a time range of 20–30 min (Amicone et al. (study 1 and 2), 2018; Greenwood & Gatersleben, 2016 ; Johnson, et al., 2019 ; Stevenson, et al., 2019 ). These studies were most consistent in reporting positive effects of nature exposure, in particular, on selective attention, working memory, concentration, alerting, orienting and speed, with exception of impulse control (Amicone et al. (study 1), 2018), exogenous attention (Johnson, et al., 2019 ) and executive attention (Stevenson, et al., 2019 ).

The remaining short-term exposure studies used post-intervention designs and during intervention designs (10 to 60 min) (Wallner et al., 2018 ; Li & Sullivan, 2016 ; Mygind, et al. 2018). Our review supports the effectiveness of short-term nature interventions to improve attentional functioning. However, mixed results were reported on sustained/selective attention, namely, positive effects were reported by Wallner et al. ( 2018 ), and no effects were reported by Mygind et al. (2018).

Four studies in our review applied longer-term exposures in their designs (Fägerstam & Blom, 2013 ; Wells et al., 2015 ; van Dijk-Wesselius et al., 2018 ; van den Berg et al., 2017 ). Specifically, there were two experiments (Fägerstam & Blom, 2013 ; Wells et al., 2015 ) that examined whether exposure to natural environments influenced knowledge retention over longer-time periods (5 and 6 months, 1 and 2 years follow-up). Both studies examined outdoor education in school-settings. Wells et al. ( 2015 ) provided support for benefits of outdoor education in school settings for primary school children, Fägerstam and Blom (2013), however, reported benefits for 7th graders but not for 8th graders.

The remaining two studies (van Dijk-Wesselius, et al., 2018 ; van den Berg, et al., 2017 ) examined long-term nature exposure (2 and 4 months, and 1 and 2 years, respectively) on attentional functioning rather than long-term knowledge. The studies were complex in their design and provided mixed findings of nature exposure on selective attention and processing speed. For example, the green wall study (van den Berg, et al., 2017 ) was designed to measure attentional functioning after a short-time exposure of looking at the classroom green wall (a few minutes), just before testing. In addition, this short exposure was also combined with longer-term exposures of 2 and 4 months, accumulating during the time children were studying in the green wall classroom. So, it is difficult to disentangle short-term effects from long-term effects. Similarly, van Dijk-Wesselius, et al. (2018) used 1 and 2 years of long-term exposures to school greenery and reported beneficial effects on processing speed at the second follow-up. However, the testing was administered after school recess, again adding a short-term exposure as a possible effect.

The primary aims of this review was to (1) systematically evaluate the body of experimental and quasi-experimental studies examining the effect of nature (greenspace) on cognitive functioning in children and adolescents; (2) to investigate the underlying processes involved in possible effects of nature on cognitive performance and to consider the adequacy of different theoretical models to explain any effects; and, finally to, (3) examine whether the effects of nature exposure differ according to age. In addition, possible differences in relation to the duration and type of nature intervention were examined. This review found that based on 12 relatively high-quality studies, there seems to be substantial evidence that exposure to nature can enhance cognitive functioning in children and adolescents. This review included an examination of a range of cognitive functions relating to attention and knowledge acquisition including working memory tests, selective attention tests (also including tests with varying degrees of sustained/selective attention tests, processing speed), impulse control tests and long-term memory (knowledge acquisition). Many positive effects were found especially across the sub-categories of working memory and sustained/selective attention. There were only three studies focusing on processing speed (n = 2) and impulse control (n = 1) and the findings of these were less favorable. These findings suggest that key cognitive processes relating primarily to attention and memory (working and long term) were enhanced following nature exposure. This was irrespective of the actual nature intervention being delivered (e.g., playing outdoors in greenspace, observing nature from a window or gardening). As all the included studies were of a high (n –10) or moderate standard (n = 2) using the EPHHP, the findings hold firm and have practical implications for learning environments with young people. Integrating nature interventions with teaching and learning practices can provide welcome cognitive relief for highly anxious young people feeling the pressures of academic performance and testing. Simply learning amidst nature and short-term nature interventions can have beneficial cognitive effects particularly for high school students.

This review also explored what the underlying mechanisms might be for nature exposure to lead to favorable cognitive outcomes for school aged children. There was substantial support for the restorative effects of nature on cognitive functioning. This was ascertained by improved attentional functioning after nature exposure, relative to being amidst built environments, as well as by self-reported accounts about how replenished the students felt after nature exposure. This is consistent with ART and previous studies such as van den Berg et al. ( 2016 ) who found that children reported feeling restored after being in nature. While stress reduction, relaxation and well-being were also reported as outcomes in a variety of studies, thus supporting SRT and the biophilia hypothesis respectively, the findings were not always consistently favorable for all outcomes. For example, Greenwood and Gatersleben ( 2016 ) found that participants improved their concentration, positive affect and heart rate after a break outdoors in nature (compared with an indoor condition) but their blood pressure did not improve. Interestingly, this study also found that the effects of nature on positive affect were strongest when participants were with a friend as opposed to being alone. Studies like this suggest that there may be a synergistic effect of numerous mediating factors as well as the potential for confounding factors such as social interaction, to contribute to the benefits. In addition, the ability to examine underlying mechanisms depends on the measures selected for the studies and the reliability and validity of these measures to accurately detect change. For example, it may be that certain physiological indices are more sensitive measures of change than others (e.g., heart rate compared with blood pressure) or that subjective experiences may be easier for researchers to measure than physiological outcomes. It is important in the future to design a priori nature studies that can effectively test the relative contributions of theories and mediating factors. This review has identified some likely contributors but a better understanding of the combination of factors that are most conducive to nature benefits will have positive implications for practice and achieving desirable outcomes for cognitive functioning and well-being.

Along these lines, the active or passive role nature plays in exposures may be an important factor to consider when examining cognitive outcomes of nature interventions. The scope of this review does not allow different mechanisms related to types of involvement in nature exposure designs to be identified; however, it would be worth knowing if different forms of engagement with nature lead to different cognitive outcomes. If we use Norwood’s (2019) definition of active/passive engagement with nature, most of the included studies in our review used passive rather than active nature exposure as the intervention treatment, that is, nature was used as a background for other activity like walking, active play and sitting quietly while reading. In contrast, in two outdoor education studies (Fagerstam & Blom, 2013; Wells et al., 2015 ) nature played a central role. In the remaining studies, nature may be argued to have played somewhat of an active role. One study involved a green walk with a series of added short talks to contemplate on nature (Stevenson, Dewhurst, Schilhab, & Bentsen, 2019), and another study (Amicone et al., 2018 , study 2) used free play in the garden with the intention of shifting children’s attention from an activity of a regular group game. Finally, the green wall study (van den Berg et al., 2017 ) used living plants designed as a visual focus during the rest period, as a short-term exposure, which would make it an active use of nature. However, the study also involved a long-term exposure to the green wall in its follow-up, which would make it a passive type of exposure.

The issue of passive/active role nature plays in exposure designs to explain underlying mechanisms in nature-cognition relationship often overlaps with active/passive involvement of participants themselves in how they use the natural environment. The underlying mechanisms may be similar. The nature exposure may facilitate physical activity (e.g., walking or playing in a garden) or simply involve being passive around nature (e.g., looking at nature from a classroom window). It appears that for younger students in primary school, physical activity in nature is common and beneficial. Benefits may be partly due to the physical development and coordination that occurs for young people during this age and their innate drive to play and explore (Fjørtoft, 2004 ). For high school students, nature exposure effects occurred with as well as without physical involvement—this is a promising finding given that adolescents tend to be at high risk of mental illness and can experience high levels of anxiety (Tiller et al., 2020 ). A limit to understanding how nature differentially affects children at various ages, is that the focus of the experimental studies has been on high school students. More high-quality research is needed with primary school students, particularly in the early years. Moreover, considering that studies report on various cognitive domains and that they differ substantially in design, study population and nature exposure, the comparison of subgroups is highly restricted. There are also additional differences on how the studies apply statistical adjustments for demographic and socio-economic confounders.

Despite a lack of consistency in findings on long-term nature exposure benefits for cognitive functioning, one should not dismiss positive findings in the area of greening or outdoor education interventions used in short-term school settings. Studies on everyday exposure to greenness for all age groups provide insight into the methods of reducing attentional difficulties and the ways to support academic development (Faber Taylor and Kuo, 2011 ; Tallis, et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2014). In consideration of education becoming increasingly important for children, particularly as they spend more time in the school environment when they progress through primary, middle and high school levels, more research is focused on school surrounding greenness (Li, et al., 2019 ; Matsuoka, 2010 ). Li, et al. (2019) measured greenness as tree cover density and reported a positive association with adolescents’ academic performance. More sophisticated measurement of school greenness was applied in Matsuoka’s (2010) study to examine how particular nature features around school buildings would be best associated with students’ grades. Student performance was positively associated with greater quantities of trees and shrubs, particularly as viewed from their cafeteria. Conversely, large area features like parking lots, campus lawns and athletic fields were negatively related to academic performance.

Hence, greenspace exposure seems to be correlated with children’s and adolescents’ cognitive functioning in different ways depending on their developmental level. Further investigation of long and short-term effects of well-defined nature exposure over the child’s life course has the potential to provide guidance for parents and school leaders on how nature exposure may help students better engage with their learning or improve their overall academic achievement. While research indicates nature exposure benefits across a child’s life span, more attention should be given to identifying specific greenspace features for well-defined and diverse populations. For example, it may be useful to distinguish children with mild symptoms of attention disorders from those with severe symptoms. Findings from Faber et al.’s (2011) study indicate that relatively open grass settings could better alleviate attention symptoms for hyperactive children than settings with trees and grass. School-based short-term interventions may play an important role in self-regulation issues as it is important in everyday school tasks and essential for effective attention functioning (McClelland, et al., 2010 ). Correspondingly, direct attention—described in ART theory as having limited mental resources and requiring restoration—would equally benefit from nature exposure. Children are being challenged with increasing cognitive demands and nature exposure can be restorative for each age group in different ways. To establish exactly how this occurs, precise descriptions of nature exposure are required. Furthermore, measurements of cognitive functioning should be sensitive enough to detect meaningful differences across the child and adolescents’ age span so that age-appropriate nature strategies can be developed.

Strengths, limitations and implications

The high quality of studies included in this review is a strength. This was examined using the EPHPP which assessed six domains (selection bias, study design, confounders, blinding, data collection methods, withdrawals and dropouts). Ratings were conducted by both authors with near perfect consistency, indicating that 10 of the 12 studies adhered strongly to quality standards and two moderately to quality standards. The main areas of bias occurred mainly in the study design and blinding domains. This is not surprising for nature interventions with ecological validity, where blinding is not really feasible. Another limiting factor concerns the suitability of the comparison group. While it can be argued that greenspace interventions can be compared with alternative conditions that are commonly used in schools, if the comparisons are barren concrete areas like car parks, then the relative benefits of greenspace would not be surprising. Comparing greenspace with other spaces that are aesthetically pleasing, such beautifully designed buildings would make a fairer comparison. Overall, however, the high quality of studies included in this review provide confidence in the findings obtained and the case for investing in nature interventions for improved cognitive health and well-being, particularly for school children.

Our main objective was to establish if the causal effects of nature on cognitive functioning could be demonstrated experimentally in variety of settings involving both short-term and long-term cognitive outcomes. However, this objective presents a challenge to explain precisely how the process occurs. A closer analysis would require refinement of the definition of nature exposure itself. Norwood et. al. (2019) advocate the need to isolate the role of nature exposure in research away from possible confounders. For example, nature exposure in adventure or wilderness therapy is an integral part of such interventions and they use nature in an active way alongside the counselling process itself. For this purpose, they define passive nature exposure in an attempt to remove it from possible factors like social engagement. Such passive exposure may "take place in a natural environment which itself is not actively integrated or consciously used in an activity" (Norwood et. al., 2019, p.72).

The studies in this review were not designed to examine nature exposure in its pure form that would eliminate the influence of other possible variables, such as being with other people or engaging in various types of physical activity, and they differ in the degree of passive/active use of nature in their exposure settings. The selected studies also focused on real-world settings, including potential confounders such as social interaction and physical activity (see Appendix Table 8 for passive/active dimension of interventions).

Thus, a strength of this review lies in the inclusion of a variety of types of nature exposure in terms of duration and settings to demonstrate causal effect of greenspace on cognitive functioning. However, because of the wide inclusion criteria it was difficult to determine the exact mechanism of impact. Although further analysis of short-term and long-term exposures allowed for identifying factors described in ART theory on attentional processing, there was not enough evidence for explaining mechanisms involved in long-term nature exposures (see Appendix Table 8 for short-term/long-term duration of interventions).

Similarly, this review includes a variety of outcome measures. Some of them are used in a traditional school environment, others, coming from laboratory test settings. This wide inclusion criteria on our outcome measurement is a strength as well as a limitation. Comparing different outcome measures limits generalizing to overall cognitive functioning. However, a wide range of possible cognitive benefits provide an opportunity to further explore the greenspace-cognition relationship. The majority of outcome tests adopted in the included studies are of particular interest. They relate to attentional functioning such as direct attention, selective attention and also mental processing involving tedious activities. These mental functions are in constant demand in school classrooms (Diamond & Taylor, 1996 ) and require frequent restoration. The studies included in our review show how to restore attention through short-term exposure to nature to maintain students' focus and optimal attentional functioning. We also included studies with traditional outcome measures of academic performance that are mainly designed to examine possible long-term effects of nature exposure. Our findings suggest that employing both types of nature exposures can be beneficial. The short-term nature breaks would maintain basic healthy attentional functioning in the classroom and, at the same time, long-term nature exposure is recommended to provide a supportive environment for other restorative aspects of students' functioning, including social, physical and mental dimensions. Further research is required to identify the exact underlying mechanisms of long-term nature interventions involving holistic approaches to student functioning.

Another limitation is the narrow range of geographical areas of the papers included in this review, with different climates and cultures. Greenness as measured by NDVI most often excludes other colors that are part of nature. For example, autumn color foliage has been perceived as especially restorative by elementary school children when compared to green foliage (Paddle & Gilliland, 2016 ). The findings indicate that greenspace measures should expand to include orange and perhaps other colors that we can find in high mountainous areas or deserts.

Recommendations for Future Research

A number of design issues warrant attention in experimental studies of nature exposure on cognition. Nature exposure needs to be well described at every stage of the experiment for both short-term and long-term studies. For example, studies that are designed to examine short-time effects of nature on attentional functioning should also be accounting for long-term exposure to the natural environment (like surrounding school, neighborhood, or home greenery) with the same scrutiny as socio-economic status is routinely checked in many studies. Correspondingly, for long-term studies, most often measuring surrounding greenness, the testing environment itself also needs to be described, with special consideration given to any natural green features (e.g., does the testing room have windows with green views, or is there a living plant in the area?).

There is also the issue of lack of consistency between nature exposure experiments of pre-exposure activities. For example, studies in school settings may have specific classes like maths or art before testing. These classes need to be described as they may vary in the extent to which they are cognitively demanding. Likewise, for long-term exposure studies examining for example, school greenness on academic performance, pre-testing conditions like their environment on the way to school, need to be accounted for. For example, some students may need to walk through busy urban streets to get to school for an exam, while some may be walking through a park. Thus, pre-testing conditions need to be accounted for in most experimental designs in order to control possible differences in nature exposure effects.

The positive findings from this review are heartening given the modern-day pressures faced by many young people in westernized society (Blake et al., 2018 ; Michaelson et al., 2020 ; Vancampfort et al., 2018 ) including the pressure to perform well academically (Tiller et al., 2020 ). The diminishing opportunities for nature exposure, and immersion in the technology saturated lives of young people, heighten the importance of embedding nature in the everyday experiences of young people to enhance mental health (Capaldi et al, 2015 ; Diaz et al., 2015; Hartig et al., 2014 ). Hence, exposure to nature during school time is ideal. The findings that short-term active and passive nature interventions were effective for promoting cognitive functioning makes the integration of nature into school life feasible. It is also worthwhile given that nature exposure facilities cognitive qualities such as attention, memory and knowledge acquisition that are conducive to learning (Mason et al., 2021 ). Urban planners and educators need to consolidate efforts to create a range of short and long duration nature interventions including school yard greening, internal greening, classroom views of nature and curriculum focused on biology, horticulture, sustainability and biodiversity. Preliminary findings suggest this would create a physiologically calming and restorative environment conducive to improved attention and knowledge acquisition—both of which are essential for learning. Support for school-based exposure to nature is growing and this systematic review focusing on high quality experimental studies, has contributed to a tipping point of evidence favoring the dissemination of nature interventions for enhanced cognitive functioning with children and adolescents.

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Acknowledgements

Dianne Vella-Brodrick would like to thank the Higgins family for supporting her role as Gerry Higgins Chair in Positive Psychology. This role has enabled the development of a new research program on Nature and Wellbeing which has commenced with this review paper.

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Vella-Brodrick, D.A., Gilowska, K. Effects of Nature (Greenspace) on Cognitive Functioning in School Children and Adolescents: a Systematic Review. Educ Psychol Rev 34 , 1217–1254 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09658-5

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Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

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The Beauty About The Nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.

Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."

It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.

The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
Each natural action is graceful.

"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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Front Psychol

Nature play in early childhood education: A systematic review and meta ethnography of qualitative research

Jannette prins.

1 Department of Education, Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Femke van der Wilt

2 Department of Educational and Family Studies, Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

3 LEARN! Research Institute, Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Chiel van der Veen

Dieuwke hovinga.

4 Department of Education, University of Applied Sciences Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands

Associated Data

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Play in nature-based environments in childhood education has positive benefits for child development. Although previous reviews showed the benefits of play in nature-based environments for child development they did not attempt to understand how and why nature-based environments contribute to play quality. This review aims to explore the value of play in nature-based environments compared to non-nature-based environments for developmental outcomes of young children (2–8 year). We searched for studies that investigated the relation between play and nature-based environments on the databases PsycINFO, ERIC, and Web of Science. Inclusion/exclusion criteria were: (1) the study focused on play in/on a nature based environment, (2) the study included participants between the age of 2–8 years, (3) it was an empirical study, (4) the study was conducted in the context of early childhood education (ECE), and (5) the study included participants without special needs or disabilities. Using these criteria we selected 28 qualitative studies with an overall sample size of N = 998 children aged 2–8 years. The studies were synthesized using an adaptation of Noblit and Hare’s meta-ethnographic approach. Three overarching themes were found: (1) the aspects of play quality that are related to nature-based environments, (2) the aspects of nature-based environments that support play, and (3) the aspects of teacher-child interactions that contribute to nature play quality. The meta themes resonate with play theories and theories of the restorative value of nature. We draw on the qualitative data to refine and extend these theories, and to come up with a definition of the concept “nature play.” This systematic review also sets a base for future research on play interventions in nature-based environments. We argue that (1) research will benefit from thoroughly conceptualizing the role of play in the development of young children, (2) using the affordances theory research will benefit from moving beyond the individual play actions as a unit of analysis, and (3) from an educational perspective it is important to shift the focus of nature play to its benefits for children’s cognitive development.

Introduction

In early childhood education (ECE), play and learning are inextricably intertwined ( Hirsh-Pasek, 2008 ). Play is often considered as a context for young children’s learning and development, and can take place indoors (e.g., in a classroom) as well as outdoors (e.g., in a nature-based environment). However, outdoor play in ECE is often done for its value to relax and recover from the important play and learning time that takes place indoors. As a result, in ECE play in outdoor settings is not often valued for its potential benefits for children’s learning development ( Miranda et al., 2017 ). Recently, many studies have focused on play and learning in nature-based environments. Based on these studies, this review aims to explore the value of play in nature based environments in ECE. The research for this review was guided by the following question: what is the value of play in nature-based environments compared to non-nature-based environments for developmental outcomes of young children (2–8 year).

Play as a context for child development, three perspectives

In most cultural communities, play is a major aspect of children’s life ( Roopnarine, 2012 ). Most play researchers agree on the importance of play in early childhood. In fact, play is seen as a key element of child development because it is the context for the development of cognition (including language), motor skills and social-emotional competence ( Rubin et al., 1983 ; Golinkoff et al., 2006 ; Nathan and Pellegrini, 2010 ).

To affirm the importance of play, in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ( United Nations, 1989 ) play is viewed as a fundamental need and right of children. This need for and right to play needs to be respected in the lives of young children. Consequently, article 31 challenges us to understand play from the perspective of children’s needs and rights.

Before play ended up as a fundamental right in the Children’s Rights Treaty, the critical role of play has been studied by many scholars using different theoretical frameworks. According to Wynberg et al. (2022) , roughly three theoretical perspectives can be distinguished. First, Piaget describes in Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood ( Piaget, 2013 ), how children incorporate objects and events of the world around them in their play, creating a mental model of the world. In this genetic epistemology perspective, children’s level of cognitive development is reflected in types of play (functional and constructive play, symbolic/fantasy play and games with rules). Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests four phases in which intelligence changes as children grow. For early childhood the first three are relevant: children (0–12 year) grow from sensorimotor intelligence (e.g., children understand the external world only by sensing and touching objects that are present), into preoperational intelligence (e.g., during this period children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations, they still need to act in the external world to perform these operations) into concrete operational intelligence (e.g., children can use logic and transform, combine and separate concepts on a mental level) In this way, children’s play can be classified on the basis of their cognitive development, but children’s play is not seen as a context for new development. Therefore, this theoretical perspective does not explain how children’s play quality and the physical environment are related.

Secondly, in contrast to Piaget’s view that play reflects the actual level of children’s cognitive development, in Vygotsky’s cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), play is considered a social activity in which children meet and interact with the social cultural environment. With help of parents, educators and peers, children gain in play a driving force for further cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development ( Nicolopoulou, 1993 ).

Leontiev advanced Vygotsky’s theory by differentiating play actions from play activity. Play actions are performed to achieve a single goal. A play activity is a set of related play actions that meet children’s need to get to know the world around them and be able to contribute to it. Their play activity derives its meaning from the satisfaction of fulfilling this need, which is the motive for their activity. However, the goal of a play action does not necessary coincide with the motive of the activity. In fact, the single goal of an action often comes apart from this motive. For instance, children in a nature-based environment collect sticks (action) to build a pretend bonfire (activity) to fulfill their need to get the feel of making a bonfire (not because they were cold or needed to cook).

Within CHAT, tool use is an important aspect of play activity. Tools help children to fulfill their need and these (symbolic) tools link the action (collecting sticks) to their motive (getting to know bonfires by pretending to make one). In other words, children are motivated by these tools. In the play context, tools have agency to achieve goals ( Bodrova and Leong, 2015 ; Wynberg et al., 2022 ) and motivation to use the tools is what makes children act, think and develop ( Nicolopoulou, 1993 ; Deci and Ryan, 2008 ; Bakhurst, 2009 ). As a result of engaging in play, the perceptual world–i.e., the world the child meets through perceptually interacting with it–becomes a conceptual world of meaning and value. In this process, the child develops the mental power to understand the (meaning of) the world that surrounds him/her. The perceptual world invites or affords play activity ( Bakhurst, 2009 ). In the example of children building a bonfire, the sticks mediate between the perceptual and conceptual world, children use their mental power to imagine the real fire and the heat that comes from it, while building the bonfire and gathering around it. Although CHAT accounts for the role of the physical environment in children’s play, the environment is mostly viewed as situated in a socio-cultural environment.

Thirdly, Gopnik (2020) describes childhood from an evolutionary perspective as a time for the human mind to explore the unpredictable range of human possibilities. To develop the capacity to navigate the perceptual world, in other words to get the feel or hang of it, children actually have to feel the world and hang around in it. During childhood, children are especially prone to explorative and “active” learning. While involved in messy and intuitive play actions, children gather new information about the world around them, learning and adapting without using adult intelligence, such as planning or focused attention. Instead, they get involved with all their senses to imagine even far-away and unlikely hypotheses, such as using objects during play in a creative way, not being hindered by experience of the usual function of the object ( Gopnik and Wellman, 2012 ; Schulz, 2012 ; Wente et al., 2019 ). Within the evolutionary perspective childhood is an extended time for exploration of an environment that is variable, with a mix of predictability and unpredictability. In the same way as the CHAT, within the evolutionary perspective the focus is on cultural learning, i.e., obtaining information from other humans and not so much from the interaction with the nature-based environment.

Although these three perspectives differ in focus and methodology, they all acknowledge play as important for child development. During play children find out the meaning of the world that surrounds them, including the physical world, and learn how they can interact with it. In this way they develop as human beings with cognitive, social, emotional, and motor competencies.

Defining play

In this review, we focus on play and how the quality of play might be supported by the physical environment where children play. Therefore, we need a definition to distinguish play behavior from other behavior. As we have seen in the literature on play there is no defining key factor that connects all actions that are recognized as play actions. In the Oxford handbook of the development of play , Burghardt (2012) comes up with a set of five criteria that characterize the play of all animals: (1) It is not fully functional in the form in which it is expressed; play actions can look functional but the actions do not contribute to survival; (2) It is spontaneous, voluntary, intentional, pleasurable, and done for the sake of playing; (3) Play differs from functional behavior in structure or timing in at least one respect: incomplete, awkward, and precocious; (4) It is performed repeatedly but not in a stereotyped way; and (5) It is initiated when the animal is “relaxed”: well fed, warm and safe. These five criteria partly overlap with the dispositions described by Rubin et al. (1983) . They define play as: (1) intrinsically motivated; (2) for the sake of play(ing); (3) deriving pleasure from it, and; (4) having the freedom to modify the rules within the play ( Rubin et al., 1983 ). For this review, we will combine the aforementioned criteria and include all behaviors that can be classified as a child’s interaction with the environment, while being highly involved, intrinsically motivated, deriving pleasure from it, and having the freedom to modify the rules (cf., Rubin et al., 1983 ).

The quality of the physical environment in relation to play quality

The physical environment where children play is part of their play. The value of explorative and active play is directly related to both the complexity of the physical environment and the opportunity to incorporate the environment in play ( Gopnik, 2020 ). In other words, an environment not only serves as a play décor, but it also serves as a place that affords play. For example, findings from systematic reviews consistently demonstrate that a nature-based environment affords different play behavior compared to non-nature-based environments ( Gill, 2014 ; Dankiw et al., 2020 ; Zare Sakhvidi et al., 2022 ). How can this be explained?

The affordances theory of Gibson (2014) is a way to describe an environment in terms of the distinctive features that offer possibilities for play behavior for a child or a group of children. An affordance is something that refers to both the environment and the skills of a child at that moment. The affordance theory helps to understand why nature-based environments differ from non-nature-based environments. For instance, a tree can afford leaning for a 1-year old, hiding for a 5-year old and climbing for a 7-year old. Heft (1988) and Kyttä (2002) advanced the affordances theory into a functional taxonomy, by describing the distinctive functional properties of an environment, properties that are both objectively real and psychological relevant. It is a way to describe the setting, the person (the child with her skills at that moment) and the action as a “system.” According to Heft (1988) , the functional possibilities for meaningful play that children perceive in nature-based environments are different from the possibilities they perceive in non-nature-based environments.

In addition to the affordances theory to describe the assets of nature-based environments for play, two complementary theories from research on nature-based environments are related to aspects of play (quality) as well: the Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) and the Attention Restoration Theory (ART) ( Ulrich, 1983 ; Kaplan, 1995 ; Berto, 2014 ). SRT is a psycho-evolutionary theory that states that since humans evolved over a long period in natural environments, people are to some extent physiologically and perhaps psychologically better adapted to nature-based environments as to non-nature based environments. ART is a psycho-functionalist theory that states that humans have an innate predisposition to pay attention and respond positively to natural content (e.g., vegetation and water) and to settings that helped survival during evolution. Both theories state that nature-based-environments are more restorative than non-nature-based environments; according to SRT, nature-based environments relieve physiological stress whereas according to ART, nature-based environments restore mental fatigue. In this way nature-based environments contribute to play quality as we look at the criteria for play quality mentioned above: a child can only initiate play when it is relaxed, and play asks for involvement and attention.

Defining nature-based environments

As we see how the quality of the play activity of a child is intrinsically linked to the nature-based environment, we need a definition to distinguish a nature-based environment from other environments. As it is difficult to find one key factor to define play, there is also no such key factor that connects all environments recognized as nature-based environments. To describe such an environment the affordances theory of Greeno (1994) , Gibson (2014) , and Lerstrup and Konijnendijk van den Bosch (2017) makes it possible to look at an environment in terms of affordances. He described five affording features of an environment: (1) places, (2) attached and (3) detached objects, (4) substances, and (5) events. In this review, we use these features to distinguish nature-based environments from non-nature-based environments. Nature-based environments (1) have a surface (place) that is the basis for growth of living elements, (2) provide possibilities for interacting with living, non-man-made elements like plants, trees, and insects, (3) these living elements “provide” loose materials to play with, such as sticks, seeds, feathers, and shells (attached and detached “objects”), (4) non-living elements are part of a nature-based environment as these elements are connected to the biosphere of the living elements such as water, rocks, and soil (substances), and (5) weather elements such as fresh air, rain, wind and sunshine, or seasonal elements such as blooming or decay are the features that ensure change (events) ( Gill, 2014 ; Chawla, 2015 ; Dankiw et al., 2020 ).

The role of the teacher

For this review, we also investigated the role the teacher has in designing and/or choosing the play environment. The motivation and the capacity to be taught by the world is not totally innate. It needs to be nurtured and sustained by adults. Early childhood teachers are part of the play context and have a role in mediating between the child and the world. In this context they also have a role in the acquisition and use of language during play. While the perceptual world with its structure and rules becomes a conceptual world in play the acquisition and use of language makes it possible to store the concepts in the mind ( Huizinga, 2014 ). Most play theories agree on the role early childhood teachers have in guarding children’s play, enriching children’s play environment, and protecting children for dangers, but there is considerable debate on the question if and how adults should participate in children’s play activities ( van Oers, 2013 ).

Reason for this review

Reasoning from play theories and the environmental psychologist theories we might expect that nature-based play environments, as an indivisible part of children’s play actions, can contribute to children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development.

In the last decade, many studies have been conducted into the relation between a healthy development of children and engagement in nature-based environments. Most of these studies have focused on health and physical activity. The reviews of Gill (2014) , Chawla (2015) , and more recently Dankiw et al. (2020) have provided overviews of the benefits of nature for children’s development. These reviews were focused on children between 1 and 12 years old. First, the systematic review of Gill showed the benefits of children’s engagement with nature on mental health as well as physical activity. Second, Chawla’s work was not so much a systematic review but a thorough reflection on research into the benefits of nature contact for children. She placed the research in the context of changing research approaches, thus showing how different research questions and methods shape our understanding of the benefits of access to nature for children. Third, Dankiw’s review investigated the impacts of children’s engagement with unstructured nature play, finding that unstructured nature play may have a positive impact on different aspects of child development. By focusing on developmental outcomes of quantitative studies, this study did not attempt to understand how or why unstructured nature play is related to these positive outcomes. A systematic review of qualitative studies can synthesize findings and advance the knowledge base of how nature-based environments contribute to play quality. Synthesizing the fragmented literature will contribute to a useful resource for guiding future research on this topic and inform early childhood educational practices, valuing nature-based play environments as intrinsically linked to play quality.

We systematically reviewed studies into play in nature-based environments in ECE. These studies may contribute to our understanding of the experiences of children and teachers in ECE when going outside to play in nature- based environments. Moreover, these experiences set out a basis for understanding the possibilities of playing in nature-based environments for cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development in ECE. We reviewed studies in early childhood educational settings since in these settings play is an important part of the curriculum.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines ( Page et al., 2021 ) was adopted for the purposes of the present review. A PRISMA checklist is provided in Supplementary File 1 .

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Articles were included if they met the following selection criteria:

(1) The study focused on play in/on a nature based environment (studies were excluded if the exposure to nature was not specified as “interaction” or “play” or if the environment where the children played did not match our criteria of nature based environments as stated in our introduction).
(2) The study included participants between the age of 2–8 years.
(3) It was an empirical study.
(4) The study was conducted in the context of ECE (studies were excluded if they were not conducted in a center for ECE, such as day care centers and preschools).
(5) The study included participants without special needs or disabilities.

Databases and search query

Databases PsycINFO, ERIC, and Web of Science were used to identify studies that investigated the relation between play and nature-based environments. To ensure the quality of the studies we only included empirical studies that were published in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore studies written in English that were published between May 1995 and 2022 were included. We combined keywords on the two major concepts of this review: play and nature-based environments. To ensure a comprehensive search the following keywords were used for play or activity: manipulative play, object play, relational play, block play, loose part play, outdoor play, free play, unstructured play, rough and tumble play, explorative play, creative play, construction play, physical play, gross motor play, role play, pretend play, social play, imaginative play, socio dramatic play, social pretend play, as if play or physical activity, unstructured activity, explorative activity, physical activity, construction activity, and gross motor activity. For the nature-based environment, the following keywords were used: green or natural environment, playground, landscape playscape setting area or space, school garden, school forest, school wetland, school wilderness, school grassland, greenery, garden, forest, wetland, wilderness, grassland, tree cover, tree canopy, biodiverse school ground, and nature based. Boolean operators were used to ensure that each possible combination of keywords was included. The search query is provided in Supplementary File 2 .

Selection procedure

The primary search resulted in a selection of 5,961 articles. Next, duplicates were removed, and titles, abstracts, and keywords of the remaining articles were manually screened. Many studies in this first selection were either in the field of environmental science or health, and did not concern playing children. After removing the studies that obviously did not meet our selection criteria we assessed 166 articles for eligibility. We excluded 107 studies for reasons of age. We also screened studies with participants between 2 and 8 years as well as participants beyond this age. We did not include them because it was impossible to decide if the results were specific for the group of children between 2 and 8 years. A random selection of twenty articles of the 166 articles were checked with two researchers, both members of a research group performing a systematic review in the field of ECE. They checked if the article met the criteria of our definition of play and nature based environment as stated in our introduction. Quality appraisal was made through the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Tool for Qualitative Studies ( Lockwood et al., 2020 ) (see Supplementary File 2 ). Using this tool we were surprised by the innovative and creative ways these studies adapted to respect the voice of young children. We ended up with a final selection of 28 studies with an overall sample size of N = 998 children aged 3–8 years. See Figure 1 for an overview of the study selection process.

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Study selection process.

Data extraction and synthesis

The selected studies were analyzed and synthesized in four steps based on Noblit and Hare’s meta-ethnography method and adapted for this study ( Agar, 1990 ; Noblit and Hare, 2012 ; Nye et al., 2016 ): Step 1: The studies were read and re-read to gain a detailed understanding of their theories and concepts and their findings according to the following categories: (1) Design/method, (2) theories and conceptualization, and (3) outcomes. Supplementary Table 1 gives an overview of the 28 studies, specified according to these categories. To retain the meaning of the primary concepts within individual studies and to define the relations between these concepts we developed codes regarding the experiences of children and teachers while playing in nature-based environments during ECE (i.e., authors’ interpretation of the data and “second order constructs”).

Step 2: In order to determine how the studies were related, the initial codes were grouped according to key aspects of (1) play quality, (2) the nature-based environment, and (3) the teacher-child interactions. These key concepts from individual studies were synthesized, which resulted in lists of overarching themes for each of the three groups (see Figure 2 ).

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Meta-synthesis of key concepts into three themes and two Meta-themes.

Step 3: Studies were translated into one another to produce “meta-themes” across the different aspects of play in nature-based environments. To draw out the findings under each meta-theme, some studies were chosen as “index” papers from which we extracted findings. These index papers stood out in terms of their conceptual richness. Their findings were then compared to and contrasted with the findings of a second study, and the resulting synthesis of these two studies were then contrasted with a third study, and so forth. This is referred to as “reciprocal translation” ( Noblit and Hare, 2012 ; Nye et al., 2016 ). For example Lerstrup and Konijnendijk van den Bosch (2017) advanced Gibsons and Hefts theory of affordances and functional classes of outdoor features into “key activities” afforded by classes of the outdoor environment. These new concepts were used for the translation of concepts from other papers that were related but not conceptualized in this way.

Step 4: The meta-themes from step 3 were synthesized according to aspects of quality of ECE. Via interpretive reading of these meta-themes we developed a “line of argument” synthesis regarding the value of play in nature-based environments for improving developmental outcomes of ECE. This is presented in the discussion.

Meta method analysis

During step 1 we analyzed the study designs of the 28 included studies. The studies into play in nature-based environments in ECE all aimed to get more insight into the relation between children’s play and nature-based environments in ECE. The studies aimed to study a myriad of educational outcomes, such as physical activity, cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development as well as health. The relevance of these studies is motivated by concerns about changes in the practice of playing outside as healthy practice for young children’s physical and mental wellbeing. Opportunities for outdoor play have diminished drastically since the mid-20th century, due to cultural changes such as parental control and fear, inadequate access to outdoor playgrounds, screen time and the focus on cognitive development in ECE.

The studies included in the present review can all be characterized as small-scale studies using observations of play behavior in nature-based environments and interviews with teachers and children to explore their experiences of playing in nature-based environment. Participating early childhood settings in the studies were sampled based on their outdoor play practices including the design of their playgrounds. These studies can be divided into two groups: one that compared play on a nature-based (part of the) playground to play on (part of the) traditional designed playground and one that compared forest school practice to indoor/outdoor classroom practice.

In all studies, except for one, the sample size was given and ranged between N = 4 and N = 198, with a total of N = 998 and a mean of N = 36. Twelve of the studies had a sample size of < N = 20, 13 had a sample size between N = 20 and N = 100, one study had a sample size of N = 198, and one had a sample of teachers N = 63 teachers. One study did not specify the sample size. The relatively small sample sizes of most studies can be explained by the fact that the studies had an explorative and qualitative research design.

Seventeen studies used play observations describing different aspects of the relation between children’s play behavior and nature-based outdoor environments, to get more insight in how children use outdoor environments during outdoor play activities. In most studies these observations were characterized as phenomenological, ethnographical, and participatory. Blanchet-Cohen and Elliot (2011) for instance described how participatory observation was a primary method of listening to young children in unmediated ways to get insight in how the children used the nature based environment. In the studies of Moore et al. (2019) and Dyment and O’Connell (2013) observation was done by using event sampling or taking scans with an observation tool, making it easier to observe a higher number of participants.

In the studies where children’s views on their outdoor play experiences were explored, a mosaic approach was used to get insight into the views of young children, using arts-based data techniques while interviewing children. These studies were inventive and respected the way young participants are able to express their own views. For example, in the study of Streelasky (2019) , drawings, paintings, and photographs were used during child interviews to support them in expressing their views. In the study of Moore et al. (2019) , the children gave a tour around the yard to express their views on the value of the nature-based environment. Four studies also collected data from teachers, to explore their views and their interaction with children when playing outside in nature-based environments.

Although most studies used open observations to investigate the play activities of the children, some used validated instruments, such as the system for Observing Play and Leisure Activity in Youth (SOPLAY). This system is used by Fjørtoft (2001) as well as by Dyment and O’Connell (2013) and is a way to label children’s activities, for instance to assess the diversity of their activities, but it does not capture how these activities are related to the play environment. Another way to assess the quality of the play activities is in terms of involvement, freedom, and joy. In two studies, the Leuven Child Involvement Scale was used to analyse children’s play in terms of involvement and joy. Other studies ( Luchs and Fikus, 2013 , 2018 ; Morrissey et al., 2017 ) used the duration of the play episodes as a measure of the quality of the play: The longer children played, the higher the quality of their play episode.

In three studies instruments were used to assess the play potential of the nature-based outdoor environment. Mårtensson et al. (2009) , for example, used the outdoor play environment categories (OPEC) tool, which gives a higher score to environments with large integrated spaces with plentiful greenery and varied topography compared to small areas where open spaces, play structures and vegetation are placed in separate parts of the environment. Richardson and Murray (2016) used the early childhood environment rating scale (ECERS) to assess the nature-based environment, but this tool is developed to assess indoor classrooms and is not adapted for outdoor spaces.

Four of the five studies that also used quantitative data, measured children’s physical activity in a quantitative way using accelerometers, and one study measured if features of the natural environment correlated with measures of inattentiveness.

Data analysis techniques were specified in all of the studies. In most of them (24 studies) comparative thematic analysis was used as data analysis technique. In the five mixed method studies, several statistical tests were used as well.

Details about strategies to address validity were not often mentioned, but four of the studies used focus groups of teachers to discuss the finding of the studies and to perform a member check.

Meta concept and theory analysis

During step 2, we synthesized key concepts in the studies. The studies in this review were selected based on two conceptual criteria, one of them was the nature-based environment , the other concept was play (or aspects of play). Most studies used a specific theoretical framework and/or a philosophical perspective to explain and understand the expected relation between nature-based environments and play. These theories help us to conceptualize about and generalize the findings within the specific studies and help us to understand the limits of these generalizations.

Seven studies used a specific theory in which the concept of play was embedded. Most of these studies used Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, from which play can be defined as a mode of activity. However, the concept “activity” was mostly used as “the things children do” or, in other words, children’s actions. Certainly, the theory was not used to place play in the larger cultural-historical context. Other studies used a criterion- based definition of play, such as it was “free” or child initiated. For example, in the study of Brussoni et al. (2017) play was described in terms of activities chosen by the children. Different aspects of these activities in nature-based environments were explained, such as hierarchy between peers during play, the complexity of the play or the duration of play episodes. Other studies defined play as consisting of different play categories, some of them cognitively more complex. For example, in the study of Dyment and O’Connell (2013) play was described using five categories: functional, constructive, symbolic, self-focused, and talking, whereas the constructive and symbolic category was also coded as creative and imaginative. In the studies that focused on a specific type of play, such as physical play, risky play, or sociodramatic play, it was easier to extract the specific play concept. Morrissey et al. (2017) for instance, used a detailed description of the concept of sociodramatic play: involving two or more players, providing a crucial everyday context in which children are motivated to engage socially with peers, and practice skills in communication, negotiation, symbolic, and creative thinking.

Nature based environment

Twelve studies used Gibson’s affordances theory to distinguish nature-based environments from non-nature-based environments. Lerstrup and Konijnendijk van den Bosch (2017) , for instance, used the affordances approach to operationalize how play actions are afforded by a specific feature of the environment and a specific user (a child of the preschool participating in their study) of that feature. In this way, the environment is not viewed as a separate object, but as something children take with them in their own experiences. Sandseter (2009) assessed how a nature-based environment affords risky play for pre-schoolers, using the concept of affordances, but adding the role of the educator to the equation.

Some studies used the concept “play opportunities” instead of affordances, to operationalize the relation between children’s play behavior and a nature-based environment. Canning (2013) , for example, made observation notes of the play behavior during den-making sessions and focused on the conversations between children to explore how the environment offers opportunities for creative thinking. In the den-making context the nature-based environment is an integrated part of children’s play experience in the same way as the environment in the affordances approach. In short, in most of the studies the relation between nature-based and children’s play behavior is operationalized as observed activities afforded by nature-based outdoor environments.

Although all of the studies aimed to explore if and how (aspects of) children’s play behavior is afforded by nature-based outdoor environments, there is no generally accepted description of the concept “nature-based environment” and it is hardly operationalized in most of the studies. Fourteen studies ( Supplementary Table 1 nrs. 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, and 28) used a comparator outdoor play environment to compare the nature-based environment with. The comparator environment that was referred to as “traditional” or “usual,” always contained man-made or manufactured elements such as a climbing structure and a sandpit. Another similarity in the description of elements that the non-nature-based environment consisted of was the character of the surface: it was paved, concrete, or hard. This is a kind of surface that afforded functional play: riding bikes, running around. These comparator environments can serve as a starting point to describe the (operationalized) characteristic elements of the nature-based environments in the studies.

In contrast, the elements of the nature-based environment were in the first place described as elements that were not man-made and do change, grow or die (even) without the intervention of humans. For instance, in the study of Brussoni et al. (2017) the “seven C’s system” for assessing the quality of the outdoor environment was used. One of the C’s stands for change: How does the play environment change over time? Second, although nature based environments can change, grow or die without human intervention, at the same time the elements of the nature-based environment are more sensitive to human intervention than man-made elements in an a non-nature based environment, for instance a climbing structure. Therefore, nature-based environments ask for care when playing with and in it, which interferes with the children’s play actions. Third, the surface of the nature-based environment is referred to as “biodiverse, soft, and diverse.” An example of this is the study of Puhakka et al. (2019) . In this study, the greening of day-care yards consisted not only of adding green elements, but also of replacing the complete surface area of a day-care yard by forest floor, sod, peat blocks, and planters for vegetable growing, making the surface more biodiverse.

Related to the surface as an important element of the nature-based environment, in many studies natural loose parts found in or on this surface were a vital element of the nature-based environment affording specific play activities. Harwood and Collier (2017) even went a step further by not operationalizing the observed activities of the children afforded by nature-based outdoor environments, but by operationalizing the activities that the natural loose parts performed in the child’s play narrative. In this view, the agency of sticks in children’s multi modal texts was afforded by the children. This post-humanist perspective (as they called it) was interesting as it described how the agency of the children was enriched by focusing on the agency of the stick. To acknowledge the agency of nature-based environments might be a key factor in describing the special way it affords play, compared to other environments.

Three studies used a theory of place. These theories account for the fact that a child’s identity is nurtured and shaped by place ( Gruenewald, 2003 ; Adams and Savahl, 2017 ; Crippen, 2017 ). Children have strong attachments to the places they play in and actively construct places for imaginative play ( Hart, 1979 ).

Meta data analysis

In step 3 we compared and contrasted the key concepts found in the studies to one another to establish overarching themes (reciprocal translation). Most of the studies showed that aspects of children’s play quality are related to aspects of nature-based environments which might lead to benefits for child development if mediated in certain ways by early childhood educators. However, this relationship is complex and it is not easy to isolate the elements of the physical environment from all other factors that influence play quality. In order to find how the outcomes of studies were related, we grouped the studies according to (1) aspects of play quality (2) aspects of nature-based environment, and (3) aspects of teacher-child interactions.

Theme 1: Aspects of play quality: play actions, play attitude, and cognitive play

All studies pointed out that there was a relation between children’s play actions and nature-based environments. Firstly, compared to a non-nature-based environment, there was more variety in play categories while children played in nature-based environments. In the studies, a non-nature-based environment mostly afforded a more physical type of play whereas nature-based environments afforded more diversity in type of play. For instance, Luchs and Fikus (2018) observed that children showed play patterns in which they combined different play types. Six studies reported more socio-dramatic play in the nature-based environment. In the study of Coates and Pimlott-Wilson (2019) , for example, children reported that the forest site where they played offered them opportunities to make things and be creative, and enact their own stories.

Secondly, the vast majority of the studies reported how play in nature-based environments was related to children’s social-emotional attitude during play. Interesting were the studies that included children’s own perspectives on their play experiences in nature-based environments: Children often reported joy, wellbeing, and enthusiasm. For instance, in the study of Moore et al. (2019) they included “stories of agency” in which children demonstrated a strong sense of comfort and self-confidence with the nature-based environment, by telling about the freedom they felt to make footprints anywhere or to cool down in the grass. This sense of confidence was also found in the studies that observed more risky play in nature-based environments, or a higher degree of risk afforded by nature-based environment. In the study of Mcclain and Vandermaas-Peeler (2015) , the degree of “wilderness” of the environment (a creek compared to a river) afforded the degree of challenge and risk in the observed play behavior. Some studies emphasized the possibility of the nature-based environment to sustain the play story, resulting in longer play episodes, compared to episodes on the non-nature-based playground. But also in using more play space, as the nature-based environment helped them to meander from one area to another. This relates to the studies that pointed to more explorative play behavior or higher involvement and engagement during play in nature-based environment. For example, McCree et al. (2018) found high scores of involvement during play sessions on a forest school site.

Thirdly, besides the fact that playing in a nature-based environment interacts with how children play in such an environment, five studies described how this is related to children’s cognitive development. In early childhood, cognitive development as an outcome of play activities is highly dependent on how much a child is involved in play and the extent to which the child experiences wellbeing. Seven studies observed explorative play behavior, problem solving and creativity and related this to the nature-based environment. For example, in the study of Puhakka et al. (2019) , increasing biodiversity and the amount of greenery of school yards led to more explorative play, more multi-sensory play experiences, and better pre academic skills (i.e., counting) than before the intervention. In the longitudinal study of McCree et al. (2018) an improvement in academic attainment (i.e., reading, writing, and maths) was seen after 3 years of attending weekly forest school sessions compared to their non-participating peers at school. Richardson and Murray’s (2016) study was the only study that measured richer language use during forest school sessions, in terms of noun diversity, and the use of adjectives and verbs.

To summarize this step of reciprocal translation: when children play in nature-based environments, the quality of their experiences during play is improved. This is shown by a greater diversity in play actions while at the same time the duration of the play episode was extended, compared to their play in non-nature-based environments. Children’s involvement and wellbeing during play was intensified while playing in nature-based environments. Furthermore, they were not only physical active but also used different cognitive skills in their play.

Theme 2: Play aspects of nature-based environments

Although in theme 1 we showed that playing in nature-based environments relates to higher play quality, it was not yet connected to specific aspects of the nature-based environment. Theme 2 reveals that this higher play quality is connected to specific aspect of the nature-based environment. Most of the studies indicated a clear relation between nature-based environments and playing with loose or fixed natural materials. Playing with loose materials often leads to construction play. For instance, in the study of Puhakka et al. (2019) the researchers observed that children were doing more arts and crafts with the loose natural materials. In many other studies we reviewed, sticks were mentioned as natural materials with special interest. For instance, in Canning’s (2013) study children used sticks to lay out a ladder and to pretend to climb in it. In the study of Harwood and Collier (2017) the sticks even had agency, for instance they were friends carried and cared for by the child, being able to change the play narrative of the child. In four studies play with small creatures was mentioned (e.g., insects, worms, and snails), as well as care for plants and vegetation. These studies also pointed to the importance of the notion of abundance of natural materials as opposed to the notion of scarcity (for example of toys) in non-nature-based environments. Zamani (2013) described how the living character of nature-based zones sparked curiosity and wonder, and invited play with critters and plants. Also in the study of Wight et al. (2015) the fact that nature “lives” made children caring for it. In three studies the notion of place was connected to the possibility to immerse or hide in it, for instance a shrub or high grass, or to offering objects (leaves and sticks) that can be used to transform the space into a place of imagination for sociodramatic play.

Reciprocal translation led us to conclude that when children played in nature-based environments, specific aspects of the nature-based environment, such as the abundance of materials and substances to play with might be connected to quality of children’s play activities, which is related to the cognitive outcomes mentioned above. At the same time the nature-based environment owns agency in play, “it/he/she plays back, nature instigates play.

Theme 3: Teacher-child interactions

In most of the studies in this review, children’s play in nature-based environments was child initiated, not teacher led. However, the role of the teacher is part of the children’s play environment and in four studies this teacher’s role in nature-based environment was specifically investigated ( Mawson, 2014 ; Mackinder, 2017 ; Akpinar and Kandir, 2022 ). They found that the role of the teacher influences play quality. In the study of Mawson (2014) the outcomes of a hands-off approach to teacher child interactions, where children could freely roam throughout the woods, was compared to a hands-on approach with teacher-led activities. These two approaches resulted in differences in child behavior. In the hands-off approach, children were taking more risk and challenged themselves more and also engaged in more socio-dramatic play, while in the hands-on approach the teacher was directing children’s attention toward objects for play and shared more factual information.

It is important to also consider other factors that support possibilities of nature-based environments for children’s learning and development. Specifically, including assessments of teachers perceptions of their children’s underachievement, along with their supervisory/teacher style. In the study of Maynard et al. (2013) , most of the children in the study that were perceived as “underachieving,” changed their behavior while playing in a nature-based environment to such extent that this “underachievement” was not seen anymore. To be outdoors in nature with more space and less constraining by teachers offered the children the opportunity to show differences in social, emotional, and learning behavior, for instance children were more cooperative, showed more pro-social behavior and remained more on task.

Reciprocal translation led us to conclude that when children play in nature-based environments, the character of the teachers’ mediation between children and between children and the environment influences how the affordances of the nature-based environment are actualized in play. When children received greater independent mobility license from their teachers ( Kyttä, 2004 ) it not only offered more opportunities for risky play, but also for more independence in being creative, explorative, and self-confident. Moreover, teacher’s mediation itself is impacted by the nature-based environment: the nature-based environment changed their expectations of children’s skills and behavior, which in turn influenced children’s independent mobility license. The more affinity with the nature-based environment teachers had, the more they were able to reinforce children’s mobility and agency toward the nature-based environment, by balancing between child initiative and teacher initiative, transferring some of their own initiative to the nature-based environment.

Taken together our qualitative synthesis suggests that the affordances for play in nature-based environments experienced by children and teachers are not only different from the affordances for play in non-nature-based environments, which is obvious, but the affordances of the nature-based environment might also improve the quality of play. This is interesting for ECE teachers, since high quality play will yield children’s learning and development ( Rubin et al., 1983 ). The studies also indicated that the relation between a nature-based environment and play quality is complex. Although the body of research into this topic is growing, more work needs to be done. The qualitative studies reviewed in this article forms a useful complement to the most recent systematic review on this topic from Dankiw et al. (2020) , which reviewed primarily quantitative studies. Insights from the current review can support our understanding of the meaning of play that is enabled and sustained by the nature-based environment for children in ECE. Taken together, our review gives a first indication of the importance of play in nature-based environments for children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development.

Qualitative research can thus unravel how children’s play and the nature-based environment are mutually constitutive and how play processes are mediated by teachers to support children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development. Through an interpretation of the synthesis, below we present a “line of argument”–step 4 in the meta-ethnography–about how nature play can promote child development. We refine parts of play theory, by elaborating on the importance of the distinctive living character of the nature-based environment and its ability to “play back.” Besides, we will use the affordances theory to reframe the concept “afforded play actions.” We argue that reciprocity and diversity are unique qualities of nature play, contributing to child development if teachers permit and support children to explore the conceptual, social, technical, and metacognitive aspects of the nature-based environment in play.

Line of argument, the value of nature play

Play theories explain how children’s active engagement with the surrounding world (i.e., play) results in knowledge of different aspects of the world, while in the meantime they learn to take part in it ( Bakhurst, 2009 ; Piaget, 2013 ; van Oers, 2013 ). This qualitative synthesis illuminates the uniqueness of nature-based environments for meaningful play activity which is largely ignored in play theories Firstly the “living character” of the nature-based environment, the fact that it has a life of its own, accounts for reciprocity and diversity in children’s play. Secondly the fact that children use tools (or toys) during play is commonly accounted for in play theories, whereas nature-based environments provide an ample and diverse supply of loose parts ( Speldewinde and Campbell, 2022 ). Which results in creative and imaginative play. Furthermore, both the stress reduction theory (SRT) as well as the ART account for the special connection between humans and nature-based environments ( Ulrich, 1983 ; Kaplan, 1995 ; Adams and Savahl, 2017 ). These theories imply that being in nature contributes to wellbeing, but do not refer to interactions with nature. For children, being in an environment leads to interaction with it, and play theory shows that the quality of these play interactions is important ( Burghardt, 2012 ; Speldewinde and Campbell, 2022 ). The current synthesis shows that, for children, not only being in nature but also interacting with nature is important, as they experience that these interactions are reciprocal. Nature has agency in these interactions and is adaptive toward diversity in children’s needs. Children listen to and tune into the nature-based environment, for example they gather sticks, pile them up for the imaginative bears to crunch them up during tea time. As such the environment instigates and enriches play.

In line with Gibson’s affordances theory, this review acknowledges how play actions are afforded by specific features of the physical environment and a specific user. However, we found that the affordances theory might overlook the complexity of the concept of “play” as it tends to look at individual play actions afforded by specific environmental features, such as a tree trunks affording jumping off. Using the affordances theory in this way, the attention will automatically be drawn to physical actions. Based on this qualitative synthesis, we argue that nature-based environments afford play activity on a more complex level than physical play actions alone. As we saw in the example of the children serving imaginative bears sticks during tea time, nature affords not only play actions, but also play scripts. The individual play actions are part of play activity that guides children to transform the perceptual world into a conceptual world. Our review indicates that nature-based environments afford the conditions for play, wellbeing, and involvement, as well as sociodramatic play and cognitive play, while in the meantime serving as a communicative context for sharing concepts together.

Our line of argument helps us to answer our research question: what is the value of play in nature-based environments compared to non-nature-based environments for developmental outcomes of young children (2–8 year). Our answer lays in defining how nature-based environments afford play in a distinctive way resulting in the concept of “nature play”: “play” in a nature-based environment consisting of natural loose and fixed elements (trees, vegetation water, sand, sticks, and stones) where children have the opportunity to engage in activities in which they are highly involved and where they have (some) freedom to develop their own play script, while interacting with and tuning into the affordances of the nature-based environment. Nature play has outcomes for cognitive, social-emotional, and cognitive development. In nature play, children have the possibility to find out how they are part of a living system. Early childhood educators are key actors in how children engage in play in the nature-based environment. They can support them to discover the conceptual, social, technical, and metacognitive aspects of nature-based environments. They need to expand children’s independent mobility to encourage them to explore the environment as well as to mediate between the child and the environment.

Strengths and limitations

The strength of this systematic review is that it synthesized the meaning of play in nature-based environments in ECE across qualitative research. It is worth noting that although the synthesized studies were small-scale studies, these studies were particularly respectful to the way children interact with the world and sincerely tried to give voice to the view of these children and their teachers. Nevertheless, small scale studies are often context-specific lacking the scale to “follow through to the implied logical entailed conclusion” ( Nye et al., 2016 ). Synthesizing the findings of these studies helps us to present new understandings of our topic, by drawing relationships between the individual studies. We acknowledge that the way we have refined and extended theory is not without its problems. A possible bias in the range and nature of qualitative research synthesized here is that outdoor play in ECE is mostly done for the reason of recess and to relax. For example, the strong emphasis on wellbeing and physical play in both the experiences of teachers and children, might reflect a western view on outdoor play in nature-based environments. Therefore, the reciprocal translation of the findings around cognitive skills were harder to synthesize although the importance of these findings for ECE should not be underestimated. Certainly, the strength of the meta-ethnographic approach is that it combines findings from multiple sources to increase validity and takes it a step further than primarily providing a narrative review of individual studies. Instead, it develops higher-order explanations. The consistency in the findings of studies in this meta ethnography supported its value, as the studies were undertaken in different educational settings, with nature-based environments varying in size and design. Another limitation is that in our attempt to translate themes across studies to arrive at higher order concepts during “step 2” of the synthesis, we may have lost some of the meaning and depth of key concepts and themes. However, we sought to preserve individual authors’ interpretations in our reciprocal translation of all the key concepts by memoing the key concepts. These memo’s contained comments on how the concepts were developed, connecting these concepts into meta themes, meanwhile we re-aligned our line of argument with the findings of the individual studies.

Future research

This systematic review provides some suggestions for future research. The first promising line for new research would be to include a deep theoretical understanding of play for the development of young children when studying interventions in nature-based environments. Although the affordances theory seems to explain how the environments afford play actions, it is not sufficient to move beyond the individual play actions. From an educational perspective we argue it is important to shift our view of outdoor play from “letting off steam” to playing in nature-based environments for children’s cognitive development.

From a methodological perspective, future research could benefit from the post humanist view in the study of Harwood and Collier (2017) . Taking the agency of the nature-based environment in the play of young children seriously, we might find new perspectives on how humans and nature are connected. This is in line with the movement of acknowledging the rights of nature, as was done for the first time with the Te Urewera Act in New Zealand ( Parliamentary Counsel Office, n.d. ). In this act, it is acknowledged that Te Urewera has an identity in and of itself, inspiring people to commit to its care. In a western view of nature-based environments we tend to look mostly at the human perspective of interaction with the nature-based environment, whereas in this synthesis it is clear that children experience nature as something that “plays back.”

Results of this systematic review using a meta ethnographic approach indicates that playing in nature-based environments not only supports young children’s healthy physical development (e.g., physical activity and motor development), but might also support their social-emotional, motor, and cognitive development. Although the studies we reviewed were mainly explorative and small-scaled, they do indicate that nature-based environments have far more to offer than only a space to relax or let off steam. Nature-based environments function as a play partner that helps children to transform the perceptual world into a conceptual world, because it diversifies play, is sensory rich and it plays back. When playing in nature-based environments, children have the possibility to connect with it in an interactive way. When teachers know how to mediate children’s interactions with the nature-based environment, these interactions will have developmental value. Therefore, we encourage early childhood teachers to change their practice of playing outdoors into “nature play” as a daily activity that supports cognitive, social-emotional, as well as motor development. Finally, as we have seen the value of nature-based environments for play, in line with in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ( United Nations, 1989 ) we might even consider nature play as a fundamental need and right of children. A need for and right to play in nature based environments that needs to be respected in the lives of young children.

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Acknowledgments

We thank Mrs. Nicole van den Bogerd for her contribution to the keywords for nature-based environments, and Mrs. Mireille Smits and Mrs. Elizabeth Wynberg for their contribution to the validation of the study selection process.

This work was supported by SIA, part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), (project number RAAK.PRO 02.079).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.995164/full#supplementary-material

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Biodiversity — The Beauty of Nature

The Beauty of Nature

Categories: Art History Biodiversity

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 727 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

The aesthetic appeal of nature, the healing power of nature, the importance of biodiversity, the role of nature in human creativity.

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The Nature and Values of Physical Education Essay

Physical educators have been recognized as contributors to school curriculum after a long and hard fight. Physical education proponents have claimed alliances with psychology, morality, science and medicine; these are the things that have validated physical education in the educational milieu (Singleton, 2009). These claims have influenced the conception of physical educators about the importance of knowledge in physical education.

Performance pedagogy is an education that is based on experience meaning that it does not related to one’s nature but is connected with what has already been experienced through performing.

It is characterized by technocratic rationality because it may be differentiated from discourses of science, psychology, and medicine, and when it is interpreted and translated to study of human development, it gives knowledge that was important to the early physical educators.

Limits of performance pedagogy are that the methods used in its measure are not valid; it is due to the fact that there is no model or theory used in its measure. Also, the selection criterion for the participants is only clear for the researcher.

Learning in constructivist theory is when individuals create understandings in their own new way basing on the interaction between what they know and what they believe, together with the knowledge and ideas they come across.

The theoretical assumptions of constructivist curriculum include the following: a learner actively constructs the meaning of something around a phenomenon, and whatever he or she constructs is idiosyncratic, or rather unique to an individual and these constructions are influenced by his or her prior experiences.

The current curriculum models of physical education that are informed by constructivist theories are sociological and psychological models. The sociological approach focuses on ways in which political, social and economic factors together with power affect the way a crowd of people create their understandings and form knowledge about their surroundings (Richardson, 2003).

On the other hand, psychological model revolves around ways used to create meaning in an individual’s mind and how the meaning that shared is developed in a group process. However, the two models focus on an individual in a social setting and focuses on him or her as a learner.

Richardson warns that constructivism that is psychologically focused shows how shared meaning is developed in a group process; however, there are some curricula which provide a possibility for students to choose activities. Also, there is no document for curriculum, which mentions students’ possibility of generating shared meanings because they are either decided by their instructors or themselves (Richardson, 2003).

He also warns that sociological model constructivism employ students in the production processes of knowledge, and at the same time examines the manner in which power works to give privileges to some people as it marginalizes others.

However, each curriculum of secondary physical education emphasizes the importance of having young people of different background, needs, abilities as well as interests. Marginalization does not encourage equity for girls and ethnic minorities in physical education, which creates an imbalance in both performance and participation.

In the past, physical education was considered to consist of only physical and practical activities, however, the recent research has justified that physical education can be included in the curriculum on the basis of scientific and intellectual merit. According to Laker (2001), justification of scientific and intellectual merit of physical education has eroded the role of physical education in schools.

In the recent years, research has developed theorized curriculum, which has led to a better understanding of the importance of physical education (McNamee, 2005). Constructivist theories have been used widely to develop programs that take students as active players in learning and teachers as facilitators (lee, 2003).

However, despite the progress, physical education is still considered as a component of leisure by some teachers rather than a contribution to the educational process (Kirk & Tinning, 1990).

The constructivist curricula implemented in physical education have enhanced students learning by developing their own understandings, as well as learning processes (Dyson, 2005). The curricula have also provided opportunities for students to challenge existing beliefs and understanding.

Reference List

Dyson, B. (2005). Integrating cooperative learning and tactical games models: Focusing on social interactions and decision making . London: Routledge.

Kirk, D., & Tinning, R. (1990). Introduction: Physical education, curriculum and culture . London: Falmer.

Laker, A. (2001). Developing personal, social and moral education through physical education . London: Routledge.

Lee, A. (2003). Student learning in physical education: Using research to enhance instruction . London: Routledge.

McNamee, M. (2005). The nature and values of physical education . London: Sage.

Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist Pedagogy. Teach Coll Rec, 105(9), pp.1623-1637.

Singleton, E. (2009). From Command to Constructivism: Canadian Secondary School Physical Education Curriculum and Teaching Games for Understanding . London: University of Western Ontario.

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Exploring Issues in Curriculum and Pedagogy
Social Constructivism in Cooperative and Distance Learning
Constructivism as International Relations Theory
Collaborating With Families and Community Members
Effectiveness of Broad, Merit-Based Scholarship Programs
The Use of Evaluation Tests
Evaluating the No Child Left behind Act
School Improvement

60 Topic Examples to Write an Essay About Nature

Sometimes you can’t find inspiration no matter how hard you try, especially when it comes to writing assignments. Many students get confused when they have the freedom to choose a topic for their essays.

If you don’t know what topic to choose, you can always get assistance from talented experts at a reliable essay writing service like EssayShark . Your assistant will help you develop a relevant topic about nature that also covers your interests. Therefore, it will not be boring for you to cope with this assignment.

You can get all your exam need from one destination such as examsnap , and for essays meanwhile, you can get the necessary inspiration from this selection of great topic examples.

General Nature Essay Topics

Let’s start with a general overview of nature essay topic examples:

The significance of preserving biodiversity in natural ecosystems
Climate change and its impact on wildlife
The role of natural topography in promoting human health
The advantages of outdoor education programs for children and adults
The effect of human activities on marine ecosystems and possible conservation efforts
The ethics of animal testing and its impact on nature
The relationship between nature and spirituality
The importance of nature in literature, art, and music
The prospect of renewable energy sources to minimize environmental damage
The implication of sustainable agriculture in preserving natural resources
Deforestation and its effect on the environment and efforts to combat it
Urban parks and their role in promoting biodiversity and environmental education
The consequences of pollution in terms of public health
The significance of protecting and conserving endangered species
Plastic waste and its impact on marine life and solutions to the problem
National parks and their role in preserving natural marvels and educating visitors
The relationship between indigenous cultures and the natural world
Invasive species and their impact on local ecosystems
The challenges of ecotourism for local communities and the environment
The connection between human civilization and the world of nature.

Topic Examples on the Protection of Nature

What can we do to protect nature and avoid the extinction of endangered species? Let’s discuss:

The significance of environmental education in encouraging sustainability
Strategies for reducing air pollution
The significance of clean water sources
Ocean acidification and possible solutions to the problem
Ways of reducing carbon emissions and transitioning to renewable energy sources
Wildlife conservation programs and their significance
Overfishing and efforts to regulate it
Reducing waste and increasing recycling rates
Deforestation and its impact on the environment
Industrial pollution and environmental justice
The strategy of using pesticides
Ways of promoting environmental monitoring and protection
Energy efficiency solutions
Noise pollution and its impact on wildlife
International cooperation in addressing global environmental issues.

Topic Examples on the Future of Nature

What the future world of nature is going to look like? How will modern technological advancement impact it? Here are some topic examples that can inspire you to examine these questions:

The effect of emerging technologies on ecological monitoring
The impact of population growth on the environment
The potential for geoengineering
The future of renewable energy sources
The result of artificial intelligence on environmental conservation
The consequences of urbanization in terms of natural habitats
Genetic engineering and conservation biology
The potential for biomimicry to inspire sustainable design
The impact of space exploration on our usage of natural resources
The future of sustainable food production
Nanotechnology and addressing the environmental challenges
Climate refugees and global migration patterns
The future of water resource management
Carbon capture and storage to minimize the climate change consequences
Virtual reality, environmental education, and awareness.

Nature Essay Debatable Topics Examples

Taking care of nature and the environment should be a priority of every human being. After all, we use its gifts and often exhaust its resources. There have been many debates around this topic. Here are some of them that might come in handy when writing a nature essay:

Is prioritizing conservation efforts for endangered species more effective than other environmental crises?
Is it moral to introduce non-native species to an ecosystem to foster biodiversity?
Should people ban plastic production and consumption to reduce its environmental impact?
Is hunting an ethical way of managing wildlife populations?
Should we choose renewable energy sources over traditional ones, even if it means paying higher prices?
Should we permit logging in protected areas to boost economic development and job creation?
The ethics behind using animals in scientific research to benefit humans
Should we permit the expansion of wildlife areas for tourism and recreation purposes?
Is it ethical to use genetically modified organisms in agriculture?
Should we prioritize the protection of natural areas or the development of infrastructure which leads to economic growth?

Even though you have many ideas on what to write a nature essay about, there might be some obstacles in your way. For instance, you might lack time to cope with this assignment properly. Or you might be afraid of making too many grammar and spelling mistakes. No matter what writing difficulties you might experience, remember that there is always an effective solution for each of them. You can turn to a trustworthy cheap essay writing service to hire an experienced assistant. It might be challenging to pick a company that fits your requirements, though. Read the reviews of others to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the popular writing services. You will make the right choice as soon as you have enough relevant information.

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Education Essay

Essay on Education

Nelson Mandela rightly said, “Education is the most important weapon to change the world.” Education plays an important role in the development of an individual and making him a knowledgeable citizen. It is the education that makes an individual self-reliant, helps to suppress the social evils and contribute towards the development of the society and nation as a whole.

Education helps in unravelling the mystery of nature. It enables us to understand and improve the working of our society. It creates conditions for a better life. Education brings out the capabilities to fight injustice happening in society. Every individual has the right to education.

Introduction

Education is a significant tool that provides knowledge, skill, technique, information and enables people to know their rights and duties towards their family, society and the nation. You can expand your vision and outlook to see the world around us. It changes our perception of life. Education builds up the ability to explore new things to enhance your creativity. Your creativity is a tool to develop the nation.

Importance of Education

People still don't realise what role education and being educated plays in our lives and society. So, before making people aware of education and working for their access, it is very important to understand the need and importance of education. Education includes traditional learning methods that include theories and modern methods that include practical implementation of the subjects.

In schools, education is categorised into four stages, and each stage is important for each student:

Primary

Secondary

Senior secondary

Education can be classified into Various Forms:

Formal education: teaches us the academic part of any course or class, skills, or theory.

Non Formal education: We learn from our community, culture, nation-based programs, and the society that we live in

Informal education: We learn from our life lessons, experiences, other people, their experiences, nature, surroundings, etc.

Education empowers everyone. It is an important aspect that shapes the modern and industrialised world. People need education to be able to cope up with the advancements in this competitive world. Following are some areas where education is needed:

Removing Poverty: Education helps in eradicating poverty from our society. An educated person can secure a good job and take care of all the basic needs and requirements of his family.

Safety and Security against Crime: A well-educated person cannot be easily duped or become a victim of any crime. They can develop the ability to stand against injustice.

Increases Productivity: Educated people are more productive. With the help of knowledge and skills, they can explore new ideas.

Confidence: A good education doesn’t mean to go to schools and colleges only. Education helps to become self-dependent and build great confidence within them so that they are able to accomplish difficult tasks.

Improved Standard of Life: On getting an education, quality of life gets improved. Education helps you to secure good jobs by which you can fulfil your dreams of buying a house or car or other luxury things.

Women Empowerment: Education helps in empowering women. Women can voice out themselves in the society against the injustice done to them. They can be self-reliant and need not be dependent on anyone. Women empowerment will bring a lot of development in society as well as in the nation.

Upliftment of the Economically Weaker Section: Education is the most significant ingredient to change the world. Illiterate people suffer the hardships of discrimination, untouchability and injustice prevailing in the society. With the advancement of education, the weaker section can improve their quality of life.

Communication: Communication is related to education. Good education helps to communicate better with others. It also improves our skills such as speech, body language, etc.

Development of a nation: The countries that focus on educating their citizens and have a higher education level are considered more developed nations in every aspect of their lives.

Individual growth: An educated individual always stands out in a crowd of uneducated people. They will be able to make better life decisions because with education comes knowledge. When an individual knows something, they will be able to understand things in a better manner.

Independent: Education acts as a catalyst for a human being to be independent. If an individual is educated enough, they can manage their own life without being dependent on anybody.

Success: Education helps in framing our mindset in a positive direction, and with this mindset, people can make their lives better. With education comes a degree, and with a degree comes a lot of opportunities. You just have to make a better choice for yourself, and everything will fall in place.

Talking particularly about India, education is a constitutional right of every citizen irrespective of caste, creed, race, religion, gender, etc. That’s the status given to education in India because educated people are always treated well and are well respected everywhere in the world.

Role of Education in Society

Education is the social institution through which the society provides its members with knowledge, facts, job skills and values. One of the most important roles of education is that it improves personal lives and helps society to run smoothly. As mentioned above, poverty can be eradicated and every individual can contribute towards the development of the country.

Education Creates a Better Society: An educated person is more likely to develop better moral and ethical values as compared to an uneducated person. Education brings equal opportunity for everyone and educated people will be able to create a better society.

Education is the Backbone of Society: Education is an integral part of human society. Lack of education gives birth to numerous social problems like poor health, conflicts, and poor living standards. Education helps people overcome all problems by finding better solutions.

Education Encourages Innovation and Creativity: Education leads to innovation. Innovation and creativity can only occur when skilled people know how to advance with different technologies. Educated people always can solve problems with the help of better techniques.

Education Creates a Better Human Being: Education is the most powerful weapon by which the entire perspective of the world can be changed. Through education, a person can develop good moral values. It helps us to become a better person in life.

Understanding the Responsibilities: As a social being, it becomes the responsibility of every individual to give something back to society and make it a better place for our next generation. An educated person is aware of his personal and social responsibilities.

Education helps in shaping the values of an individual. It helps individuals develop their moral values, humbleness, sympathy and empathy towards society, etc.

Students or any individual learn to express their viewpoints by reading, writing, learning. And these qualities or skills are taught with the help of education and nothing else.

Steps Taken to promote Education:

After discussing the importance of education, awareness is the next big step. People, especially those living in remote areas, should be aware and should have access to a better education system. The government has taken several steps for this purpose. It has started various initiatives to make education accessible to all and improve the quality of education for the betterment of every student.

Some of the Prominent Steps:

The formation of the Right to Education Act, 2009 made education a fundamental right for every child belonging to 6-14 years.

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan

Adult education and national development scheme

Beti bachao, beti padhao

Midday meal scheme and many more.

Various other initiatives that the government has taken are Udaan, Saksham, Pragati, etc., to make education accessible to every part of the county.

Conclusion:

Education is the pathway for a nation’s progress. Education is the backbone of society. The government should take all measures to provide education to every individual of the country. This will bring equality among people and when people improvise their way of living, they become more responsible towards society.

The literacy rate of more developed nations is also high, and the literacy of every nation depends upon its education system. The government undoubtedly has made laws and formulated schemes, but implementing those schemes is a major task.

The government, along with co-operation with the citizens, should make the society and nation a better place to live in. The growth of every nation depends upon the kind of population it has. A well-educated population will make a well-developed nation.

FAQs on Education Essay

1) Why is education important?

Education is important for the development of an individual. It is the most powerful weapon by which a person can contribute towards the development of the society and nation as a whole.

2) How is education a pathway to success?

Education provides job opportunities and also helps to expand your vision and change your outlook to see the world around us.

3) How can education help the economically backward people?

Uneducated or illiterate people do not have the ability to overcome hardships like discrimination, untouchability, and injustice. When these people get basic education, then they can become self-reliant and stand for their rights. With the advancement of education, they can improve their standard of living and poverty can be eradicated from the face of the Earth.

4) How are women empowered through education?

Education helps in empowering women. Women can voice out themselves in the society against the injustice done to them. They can be self-dependent. Women empowerment will bring a lot of development in society as well as in the nation.

5) What are the roles that education plays?

Education is vital in shaping the world and society. An educated society forms an educated nation. It is essential in creating a positive mindset and positive skills in an individual.

Beauty of Nature Essay

It is hard for one to witness the beauty of nature and not fall for it. Whether we listen to the mesmerising sounds of birds in the morning or love to watch the brilliant sunset in the evening, there is something beautiful about nature that fills us with joy. We are extremely lucky beings that we get to enjoy the beauty of nature every day. Let us discuss the different things that nature provides us through this short essay on beauty of nature.

When we describe the beauty of nature, several aspects like trees, plants, animals, water, hills and weather come into play. Through essay writing on beauty of nature, your kids will be able to express what they admire about nature clearly. Moreover, this essay will reveal how kids pay close attention to things that we hardly notice or care about.

Experience with the Beauty of Nature

During the mid-summer season, I went to a beautiful hill station with my family. Even though the ride was long, the beautiful scenery on the way kept me entertained. I could see deep forests and misty mountains as we went higher and higher. The winding roads also fascinated me, and I felt as if I had entered a different world. Upon our arrival at the place, I immediately fell in love with nature as it was preserved as such with fresh fragrant flowers of different kinds, cool weather and lush greenery. I found all my worries melting away as I walked amidst this wonderful nature.

Nature offers limitless happiness and satisfaction to us. As a nature enthusiast, one would find joy in the calm breeze, flowing streams or dancing flowers. From the little pebbles to sturdy rocks, everything is part of nature, which adds charm to it. Even nature creates music through the running rivers, twittering birds and gentle winds. When the sun sets and the moon takes its place, the whole sky is lit, and there is nothing more dreamlike than sleeping under the starry sky.

The seasons change, and each has its distinct beauty that cannot be matched. While spring brings in the best of nature through its vibrant greenery, winter calls for a misty and foggy beauty of nature. Autumn covers nature with a golden carpet of leaves and flowers, and summer witnesses the brightest days with delicious fruits. Besides, there are many living creatures, like birds, insects, fish, etc., in varying shape, size and colour that makes nature lively. A single peek through the window of your house would help you understand the true beauty of nature, which will surely lighten your mood.

Moral of the Essay

Each one of us will have a unique feeling when we look at nature. You can know what your child likes about nature through this essay writing on beauty of nature. We can see, feel and hear the glamour of nature in every step that we take and the air we breathe. This short essay on beauty of nature would inspire your kids to look around and take delight in its different forms so that they will be energised and enthusiastic.

How to enjoy the beauty of nature?

All of us can enjoy the beauty of nature in the ways we see it. You could either go for an early morning walk or jog in the evening, where you could be close to nature, thus imbibing its beauty. Travel with your friends and family to hill stations, beaches and exotic places, and enjoy the beautiful sunrise or sunset.

What are the factors that affect the beauty of nature?

Although nature maintains its beauty, human exploitation has caused serious threats to nature. The excessive cutting down of trees for industry and home purposes and the pollution of water, air and land through the dumping of waste from factories are the main factors that threaten the beauty of nature.

How to preserve the beauty of nature?

Nature is an invaluable gift given to us, and we must not involve in any activity that would diminish its beauty. By planting more trees, avoiding the use of plastic, and reusing and recycling things, we can maintain the beauty of nature as it is.

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What emerged from this critical review was a coherent narrative (Figure 1): experiences with nature do promote children's academic learning and seem to promote children's development as persons and as environmental stewards - and at least eight distinct pathways plausibly contribute to these outcomes.Below, we discuss the evidence for each of the eight pathways and then the evidence ...
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Abstract. This essay outlines some of the key themes and ideas developed in in the above title. These include: the influence of scientism and a "metaphysics of mastery" in late modern times; a phenomenology of nature that focusses on the native "occurring" of things in nature; the development of a notion of environmental consciousness in which sustainability is integral; an exploration of what ...
PDF EMERSON AND THE EDUCATION OF NATURE Bryan R. Warnick The Ohio State
96 Warnick - Emerson and the Education of Nature Hearing Voices in Solitude To be alone in nature, for Emerson, is to be instructed by a questioning silence. In the world of human technology and culture, I am never alone. "To go into solitude," writes Emerson, "a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.
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Cite. "The Education of Nature," by William Wordsworth, is about a girl who is blessed by Nature with beauty and vitality, but then suddenly dies, leaving her lover, the narrator, with only "the ...
Emerson and the Education of Nature
We become convinced by his thought. This essay discusses four ways in which to learn from nature, and the author's experience in nature, which echoes that of Emerson. Descriptors: Outdoor Education, Educational Philosophy, Educational Attitudes, Journalism, Learning Experience, Comparative Analysis, Moral Values, Figurative Language, Spiritual ...
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Three types of keywords targeted papers on nature or greenspace environment combined with cognitive outcomes, and school children population. An example of a search for the Effect of Nature on Cognitive Processes in School Children in Scopus is: ((TITLE-ABS-KEY ("school environment" OR child* OR "school landscape*" OR childhood OR pupil* OR "high-school student*")) AND (TITLE-ABS-KEY ...
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500+ Words Nature Essay. Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in ...
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature Summary: "Nature" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that was first published in 1836. In this work, Emerson reflects on the beauty and power of nature and argues that it can serve as a source of inspiration and enlightenment for individuals. He encourages readers to look beyond the surface of nature and appreciate its underlying ...
"Nature vs. Nurture" Debate in Education
In conclusion, this essay has explained the 'Nature vs. Nurture' issue providing arguments and evidence for the primacy of both inheritance and environment in learning and thinking. Each side leads to a different approach to education. If we accept the primacy of inheritance, this gives rise to the streaming of students based on their ...
Nature play in early childhood education: A systematic review and meta
Introduction. In early childhood education (ECE), play and learning are inextricably intertwined (Hirsh-Pasek, 2008).Play is often considered as a context for young children's learning and development, and can take place indoors (e.g., in a classroom) as well as outdoors (e.g., in a nature-based environment).
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The Importance of Environmental Education. To preserve and protect nature for future generations, we must educate people about the environment and the importance of conservation. ... This article, Essay on Nature is a helpful resource for students. Nature is a precious resource essential in shaping human civilizations and sustaining human life ...
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Essay About Nature. Nature refers to the interaction between the physical surroundings around us and the life within it like atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna, and humans. Nature is indeed God's precious gift to Earth. It is the primary source of all the necessities for the nourishment of all living beings on Earth.
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Nature' is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet's eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.
The Beauty of Nature: [Essay Example], 727 words GradesFixer
The beauty of nature has the power to ignite our imagination, stimulate our senses, and evoke a sense of wonder and awe. From the paintings of Claude Monet to the poetry of William Wordsworth, the natural world has served as a muse for countless works of art and literature. Research has shown that exposure to natural environments can enhance ...
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The Nature and Values of Physical Education Essay. Physical educators have been recognized as contributors to school curriculum after a long and hard fight. Physical education proponents have claimed alliances with psychology, morality, science and medicine; these are the things that have validated physical education in the educational milieu ...
60 Topic Examples to Write an Essay About Nature
General Nature Essay Topics. Let's start with a general overview of nature essay topic examples: The significance of preserving biodiversity in natural ecosystems; Climate change and its impact on wildlife; The role of natural topography in promoting human health; The advantages of outdoor education programs for children and adults
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Education plays an important role in the development of an individual and making him a knowledgeable citizen. It is the education that makes an individual self-reliant, helps to suppress the social evils and contribute towards the development of the society and nation as a whole. Education helps in unravelling the mystery of nature.
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Nature is an invaluable gift given to us, and we must not involve in any activity that would diminish its beauty. By planting more trees, avoiding the use of plastic, and reusing and recycling things, we can maintain the beauty of nature as it is. The beauty of nature is eternal and is a source of happiness. This short essay on beauty of nature ...

Poem The Education of Nature, Summary and Critical Appreciation

Summary of the Poem:

Critical Appreciation of the Poem:

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The nature and nurture of education

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau on nature, wholeness and education

Nature, wholeness and romanticism

Social contract and the general will

On education

On the development of the person

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Effects of Nature (Greenspace) on Cognitive Functioning in School Children and Adolescents: a Systematic Review

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Short-Term Exposure to Nature and Benefits for Students’ Cognitive Performance: a Review

How Education Can Be Leveraged to Foster Adolescents’ Nature Connection

Do Experiences with Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-And-Effect Relationship

Introduction

Literature Search and Eligibility Criteria

Quality Appraisal of Studies

Study Characteristics

Effectiveness of the Nature Interventions

Attention Tests

Working Memory

Selective Attention and Sustained/Selective Attention

Impulse Control

Processing Speed

Long-term Memory—Knowledge Acquisition

Underlying Mechanisms

Effects of Nature interventions and the Influence of Age

Study duration

Strengths, limitations and implications

Recommendations for Future Research

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Nature Essay for Students and Children

Significance of Nature

Conservation of Nature

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The Beauty About The Nature

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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Early Emerson Poems