Efficacy of an Outdoor Adventure Education Program

Subjects in the study were 24 tenth-grade students attending an alternative school for at-risk students. All students had been sent to the alternative school by school officials due to a variety of problematic behaviors such as excessive absence and tardiness, and disruptive campus behavior.

Students were randomly selected and randomly assigned to one of two groups: (1) the experimental group receiving outdoor adventure education; and (2) the control group that was not exposed to an outdoor adventure education program.

Academic achievement was operationalized in terms of GPAs and students' scores on the standardized Wide Range Achievement Test. The research approach involved the use of a two-group, pretest-posttest design.

Findings of the study supported the notion that exposure to an outdoor education program increased the academic achievement levels of at-risk students. Results were discussed in terms of the existing literature; it was noted that whether findings generalize to non-at-risk groups could not be known on the basis of this study.

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the findings that outdoor adventure education has been associated with increases in student knowledge, it seems reasonable to believe that exposure to such a program would result in increasing student achievement. Given that GPAs and standardized achievement scores are indices of student achievement, the following directional hypotheses are formulated: Hypothesis 1: Exposure to the outdoor education program will increase students' GPA. Hypothesis 2: Exposure to the outdoor education program will increase students' standardized Wide Range Achievement Test scores. Methods Design This study utilized a two-group pretest-posttest design which, according to Kiess and Bloomquist (1985) is a strong experimental approach that controls for most of the threats to internal validity. The study's independent variables were the Testing factor with two levels: Pretest and Posttest; and the Outdoor Adventure factor with two levels: Experienced Outdoor Adventure (the experimental group) and Did Not Experience Outdoor Adventure (the control group). There were two dependent measures used in the study. These were: (1) students' grade point averages (GPA) (collected before and after exposure to the outdoor adventure); and (2) students' scor
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Approximate Word count = 2726
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)