By harnessing the dual aspects of functional traits, we can better understand the implications of people responding to desired or attractive traits. The attractive trait expression (perceived at any level of biodiversity, genes, species, communities, and ecosystems) comes with sets of individual species response traits that will inform both how an organism may respond to the realization of an affordance and how sensitive different affordances are to larger-scale environmental changes. Additionally, the ecological literature tells us that there are alternative biodiversity configurations that may offer the same affordances. The affordance literature in turn reinforce that there are numerous ways in which an affordance can be realized. Affordances are only opportunities for action; the outcomes are complex and not necessarily that wellrecognized beyond the direct experience of the interaction and final service provided by the dynamics of the environment. Many of the indirect and less desirable outcomes remain less obvious.

#### REFERENCES

Linking environmental psychology and systems ecology together can help us:

Advancing such research requires interdisciplinary collaboration and deepening the understanding of complex dynamics in ecosystems, but also new data sources to build more extensive and relevant trait databases to advance the linkages between systems ecology and environmental psychology.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Both authors have substantially contributed to the conception or design of the work and provided critically important intellectual content. The outline and design of the study was led by EA. Both authors approved the submitted version of the manuscript and both agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

#### FUNDING

This research was carried out as part of the project ENABLE, funded through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, German Aeronautics and Space Research Centre, National Science Centre (Poland), The Research Council of Norway and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. TM's participation was also supported by the Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather-Related Events Sustainability Research Network (URExSRN; NSF Grant No. SES 1444755).

three challenges for designing research for sustainability. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 14, 76–85. doi: 10.1016/j.cosust.2015.03.007

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** 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.

Copyright © 2018 Andersson and McPhearson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Fostering Children's Connection to Nature Through Authentic Situations: The Case of Saving Salamanders at School

#### Stephan Barthel1,2 \*, Sophie Belton2 , Christopher M. Raymond3 and Matteo Giusti2

1 Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden, 2 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 3 Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden

The aim of this paper is to explore how children learn to form new relationships with nature. It draws on a longitudinal case study of children participating in a stewardship project involving the conservation of salamanders during the school day in Stockholm, Sweden. The qualitative method includes two waves of data collection: when a group of 10-year-old children participated in the project (2015) and 2 years after they participated (2017). We conducted 49 interviews with children as well as using participant observations and questionnaires. We found indications that children developed sympathy for salamanders and increased concern and care for nature, and that such relationships persisted 2 years after participation. Our rich qualitative data suggest that whole situations of sufficient unpredictability triggering free exploration of the area, direct sensory contact and significant experiences of interacting with a species were important for children's development of affective relationships with the salamander species and with nature in an open-ended sense. Saving the lives of trapped animals enabled direct sensory interaction, feedback, increased understanding, and development of new skills for dynamically exploring further ways of saving species in an interactive process experienced as deeply meaningful, enjoyable and connecting. The behavioral setting instilled a sense of pride and commitment, and the high degree of responsibility given to the children while exploring the habitat during authentic situations enriched children's enjoyment. The study has implications for the design of education programs that aim to connect children with nature and for a child-sensitive urban policy that supports authentic nature situations in close spatial proximity to preschools and schools.

Keywords: nature experience, affordances, affective relationships with nature, urban, situated learning, stewardship, qualitative methods, longitudinal approach

## INTRODUCTION

Globally, the number of urban dwellers is projected to increase from 3.2 billion in 2005 to about 6.4 billion by 2050 (UN-Habitat, 2016). This unpreceded rate and scale of urbanization may embark civilization on a development trajectory with limited possibilities for people, and especially for children, to experience natural environments on a regular basis (Giusti, 2016;

Edited by:

Maria Johansson, Lund University, Sweden

#### Reviewed by:

Giuseppe Carrus, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy Marianne Krasny, Cornell University, United States

> \*Correspondence: Stephan Barthel<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psrychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 14 August 2017 Accepted: 22 May 2018 Published: 08 June 2018

#### Citation:

Barthel S, Belton S, Raymond CM and Giusti M (2018) Fostering Children's Connection to Nature Through Authentic Situations: The Case of Saving Salamanders at School. Front. Psychol. 9:928. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00928

**121**

Colding and Barthel, 2017; Hand et al., 2017). Such a development trajectory, if not carefully designed, may lead to a shift in baseline related to connection to nature (Miller, 2005; Giusti, 2016; Hartig and Kahn, 2016; Soga and Gaston, 2016), defined as 'one's affective, experiential relationship to the natural world' (Mayer and Frantz, 2004, p. 504).

Multiple studies in distinct scientific traditions have considered adults' connectedness to nature, otherwise termed human-nature connections, and its relationship to proenvironmental behavior (e.g., Raymond et al., 2010; Brehm et al., 2013; Restall and Conrad, 2015; Ives et al., 2017). In the environmental psychology literature, connectedness with nature can be seen as a psychological construct that reflects the degree to which individuals perceive that they are part of the natural environment (Schultz, 2001, 2002), and such perception arguably influences adults' motivations to engage in pro-environmental behavior (Kals et al., 1999; Chawla, 2007; Ernst and Theimer, 2011; Cheng and Monroe, 2012; Liefländer et al., 2013; Mayer and Frantz, 2014; Richardson et al., 2016). For example, environmental activists report greater connectedness with nature compared to college students, suggesting that connectedness with nature may be related to pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors (Bruni and Schultz, 2010). However, recent studies indicate that the attitude–action gap is still an unresolved scientific problem in sustainability planning and management (Sörqvist, 2016; Kaaronen, 2017; Linder et al., 2018).

Scholars have recently begun to unpack the meaning of children's connection to nature and its association to different nature-based activities (Ernst and Theimer, 2011; Cheng and Monroe, 2012; Giusti et al., 2014, 2018; Giusti, 2016). For example, the findings of Cheng and Monroe's research (2012) suggest that learning, understanding, and experiencing nature are all factors that can positively influence the development of a child's affective relationship. However, the many studies aiming to evaluate an activity's effectiveness in enhancing children's connection to nature employ quantitative methods (usually performing pre- and post-activity tests), with results indicating no, or very little, change (Ernst and Theimer, 2011; Bruni et al., 2015; Giusti, 2016).

In response to this shortcoming, there is a need for longitudinal studies for assessing the changes in children's connections to nature across time. Furthermore, research is needed to assess what specific aspects of environmental education programs encourage positive shifts in connection to nature (Ernst and Theimer, 2011; Kossack and Bogner, 2012; Liefländer et al., 2013).

In this paper, we focus on if and how urban children strengthen their connection to nature, used here open-endedly as an affective relationship with nature characterized by empathy for creatures, enjoyment of nature, sense of oneness, and sense of responsibility (cf. Cheng and Monroe, 2012). We focus on a case where young children take part in a stewardship project aiming to save endangered species, the Salamander Project, and how their participation shapes their connection to nature. Our focus on children is important given that people acquire strong connections to nature most easily during childhood, by participating in social action, but also by first-hand sensory interaction with natural environments and species (Kahn and Kellert, 2002; Mayer and Frantz, 2004; Chawla, 2006, 2007; Wells and Lekies, 2006; Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Evans et al., 2007; Cheng and Monroe, 2012).

The aim of this paper is to increase our understanding about if, how and by which means children's affective relationships with nature change by taking part in a nature conservation project during school hours, and if such a shift persists 2 years postparticipation. Does participating in the Salamander Project at school strengthen children's connection to nature? If so, how do children learn to create affective relations with nature? Which specific situations might encourage or enable stronger affective relationships with nature? Do affective relations persist 2 years after the project? This paper studies fourth graders (age 10–11) who, during an 8-week period, took part in saving salamanders near their school in Stockholm. It started with a master's thesis study (Belton, 2016), which then transformed into a longitudinal study to explore whether changes in affective relationships with nature detected in these children persisted long after their actual hands-on engagement.

### Theory on Learning, Behavior and Change

Our work is firmly rooted in evolutionary thinking and framed by a social-ecological systems approach that assumes that learning emanates from human behavior in interplay with features of both the biophysical and social environment. It views human beings like other creatures in the web of life with which they have coevolved, claiming that people, like other organisms, encounter the physical world directly with all senses, with the ability to perceive qualities of the world that are really there rather than merely mental constructions about the world (Chawla, 2006). At the same time it does not deny the powerful influence of socialization and culture (Wenger, 1998; Clark and Uzzell, 2002). Instead the frame views socio-cultural influences to shape, rather than to prevent, how we select and use the information that we receive about the world's true qualities. Affordance theory (Gibson, 1979; Kaaronen, 2017) and situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), specifically fit well with such a social-ecological approach.

## An Affordance Approach to Environmental Behavior and Learning

Affordance theory is grounded in ecological psychology and interprets human behavior from a dynamic and coupled systems approach (Gibson, 1979). Ecological psychology is interested in environmental learning and action in every setting, and is particularly well adapted to describe what happens when children learn through autonomous movement and exploration, such as children at play outdoors (Kyttä, 2004; Chawla, 2006). An affordance, in its simplest understanding, refers to the action possibilities provided by objects or environments. However, a more nuanced understanding of affordances does not consider affordances as properties of objects or environments, but rather in terms of whole situations (Chemero, 2003, 2009). Affordances are defined as the 'relations between abilities to perceive and act

and features of the environment' (Chemero, 2009, p. 150). For actualisation to occur different characteristics of the individual, such as his/her physical abilities, emotions and intentions must be matched with properties of the physical environment (Kyttä, 2004; Chemero, 2009; Roe and Aspinall, 2011; Withagen et al., 2012).

Children are most likely to stay attentive and engaged when perceiving affordances that provide them with immediate, pleasurable experiential feedback about the effects of their actions (Heft and Chawla, 2006; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016). Such feedback may be perceived if children are allowed, and are able, to shape features of the physical environment and experience with all five senses changes in their environment as a result of their actions, such as when building a dam with small rocks in a stream (Chawla, 2006), or when saving the life of an animal that is trapped. Kyttä (2004) notes that these situations are characterized by positive interactive cycles: the more widely that children move through and experience their world, the more satisfying encounters they have with engaging affordances, which motivates them to explore them even further. Even if the sociocultural aspects of the environment always have been present in affordance theory (Gibson, 1979), it has of late been brought more to the foreground (Raymond et al., 2017). Affordances are dynamic and coupled human-environment relations (Kaaronen, 2017), where behavior is probabilistic and actualisation of affordances may occur when the right social circumstances are present (Clark and Uzzell, 2002; Kyttä, 2004). A situated learning approach is used below to explore how affordances are related to connection to nature and learning about nature.

#### A Situated Approach to Learning

Several well-established theories and disciplines are nested under a situated (ecological) approach to learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Barab and Roth, 2006; Durning and Artino, 2011). In brief, situated learning understands all learning and thinking as inevitably located in activity (in doing) and, therefore, inseparable from experience (Brown et al., 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Barab and Roth, 2006; Bendt et al., 2013). Many of the skills required in everyday settings are learned mainly through behavior, or through practice (Lave, 1988; Saxe, 1991), whether tacit and unconscious or explicit and codified (Leonard-Barton and Sensiper, 1998). Skills are not always articulated, it is simply what we do, or 'what changes our ability to engage in practice, the understanding of why we engage in it, and the resources we have at our disposal to do so' (Wenger, 1998, p. 97). If the concept of culture can be defined as a system that gives meaning and significance (Geertz, 1993), learning from a situated view is innately connected to the production of identity and meaning (Lawrence, 2009).

Learning can therefore be viewed as a product of people's enculturation, in turn related to the accepted norms and values of groups, within which the individual acts (such as a stewardship group) (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998, 2000). If environmental values of a participator are also reflected in the shared norms of the group, pro-environmental behavior is supported by positive feedback mechanisms provided by other group members, for instance, by way of comments, bodily postures or rewards. The social norms of the group form part of the individual member's choice architecture, in combination with properties of the physical environment. The more authentic a situation is experienced to be (i.e., the closer the situation is to resembling real life), the better a learning opportunity it provides (Reed, 1996; Boyer and Roth, 2006; Durning and Artino, 2011). As far as 'real life' situations go, scholars of environmental education and child development point to nature experiences as being particularly rich in opportunities for meaningful learning activities (Kyttä, 2002; Chawla, 2007; Moore, 2014; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016). This theory increasingly acknowledges sociomaterial features to shape situations for learning (Godden and Baddeley, 1975; Smith and Vela, 2001; Barab and Roth, 2006; Muro and Jeffrey, 2008). Hence, urban environmental education is one means by which children actualize the affordances offered by nature in cities (Chawla, 2006; Delia and Krasny, 2018).

### The Salamander Project

A pond in Olovslunds Park in Bromma (a suburb of Stockholm) is one of the most important breeding habitats within the greater Stockholm region for the two species of salamander found in Sweden1 , the common newt (Lissotriton vulgaris) and the great crested newt (Triturus cristatus) ∗ . The pond, being shallow, relatively warm and free from aquatic predators, provides an ideal habitat for these amphibians to reproduce. However, salamanders often fall in a concrete wading pool (located adjacent to the pond) during their annual migration to spawn in the pond in spring (**Figure 2**). The salamanders are unable to escape the wading pool because it is drained of water at that time of the year, and therefore dry out and die.

In 2007 the local authorities, realizing how serious an issue this was, developed a pond management plan. Both salamander species are protected under national law (Länsstyrelsen, 2015) and the great crested newt (**Figure 1**) is listed in both the Bern Convention and Annex IV of the EU Habitats Directive requiring a 'strict protection regime' by member states (Lundberg and Kiibus, 2014; European Commission, 2015). Under the pond management plan, a number of technical strategies were implemented in an attempt to solve the trap problem. These, however, were not sufficiently effective, leading the local authorities to ask for help from a nearby school in 2008 (Kiibus, 2011). Bromma, where the school is located and the project takes place, is 8 km west of Stockholm. This predominantly middle to high-income residential area has a population of 70,000 (Belton, 2016).

Every year since 2008, the fourth grade students of Olovslund School participate in the Salamander Project (60–70 students yearly). The aim is to save salamanders and simultaneously to teach the students about conservation issues. Every school lunch break of the salamander breeding season (April/May), a small group of children carefully search through piles of leaves scattered around the wading pool with sticks and place any salamanders found in a bucket of water. The piles of leaves are placed inside the concrete wading pool with its sharp edges to provide habitat for

1 Salamander is the common name for the order of Caudata, which includes newts and sirens.

the salamanders to hide and escape the sun, but they ultimately dry out, or are cleared as the pool season starts, making the pool a kind of death trap. Before releasing them into the nearby pond, the children document the number, species and sex of the salamanders found, as well as from which pile of leaves each was found. These daily reports are then communicated by the teacher to a biologist enabling the tracking of migration trends, the number of salamanders trapped and saved and monitoring the effectiveness of the project.

Over the 10 years that the project has been running, 1204 great crested newts and 3715 common newts have been rescued by Olovslund School (personal communication, 2017), allowing the local salamander population to remain stable in a time when urbanization and habitat loss pose a threat to many urban amphibian species (Lundberg and Kiibus, 2014). Another measure of success from an ecological perspective is the successful re-introduction of the great crested newt species from this pond into a nearby pond in 2009, leading to the setup of an identical operation in 2015 (Kiibus, 2011; Lundberg and Kiibus, 2014). This meant an extra task for the participants: taking the 'saved' great crested newts back to school (instead of releasing them into the pond). In order to do this, the school was granted special permission by the county authorities (Länsstyrelsen, 2015), it otherwise being illegal to collect this species in Sweden.

### METHOD: QUALITATIVE AND LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH DESIGN

Given the ample room for improving theory and understanding about children's connection to nature over time, we decided upon a qualitative and longitudinal research design (Beery and Wolf-Watz, 2014; Chawla, 2015; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016). Qualitative data was collated through semi-structured interview questions and open-ended questions included in a questionnaire administered to the school children. Our attempt was to elicit experiences of the participants both by listening to, and analyzing, their own words, which helped

FIGURE 2 | Olovslund Park with the pond on the right and the paddling pool to its left. The school is just a short walk away (source: Google Maps).

us gain a more in-depth, 'inside' understanding of the how and why lines of inquiry (Patton, 2002; Yin, 2009). We also consistently observed their behavior and activities in the field.

The theoretical starting point for this study was Chawla's (1998, 2006) framework on children's development of affective relationships with nature. This framework includes how humans acquire affective relationships with nature most easily during childhood in situations that trigger behavior and immediate feedback, which are experienced to be of significance. In recognition that connection to nature is still a contested concept in the environmental psychology and environmental management literatures (Ives et al., 2017), we explore multiple facets of affective relationships with nature and its change over time. To support a rich and deep understanding of aspects of affective relationships with nature, we sought in part for themes to emerge from the open-ended interview and survey responses. The interview script consisted of sections that sought to explore how such relationships may be shaped by aspects both of the biophysical environment and also by the social context. Follow-up open-ended and ordinal level survey questions on the same topic enabled these patterns to be examined in further depth.

The interviews and questionnaires were administered across two waves of data collection conducted 2 years apart (2015 and 2017) in order to study if changes in children's affective relationships with nature persisted 2 years after participation in the Salamander Project (see **Table 1**). In accordance with triangulation in qualitative research, we employ a range of data sources to explore and explain themes that cut across several sources (Creswell, 2014).

Contact with the school had been established prior to this study in the form of a pilot study in 2014. Alongside consent from the school principal and concerned teachers, full written parental consent was obtained for all participating students. Furthermore,

Two waves of data collection 2 years apart (2015 and 2017).

the research design was approved in an ethical review process conducted by a Swedish university.

#### Data Collection Wave One – Spring 2015 Field Observations of the Salamander Project

During the first round of data collection, nine field observations of the conservation project took place over a 2-month period (Appendix A). The first of these was of an initial information lesson given in the classroom by the teacher in charge of the project, explaining and preparing the students for their involvement in the project.

Seven field observations involved meeting the group of children and the teacher at the school and walking with them to the park to observe them partake in the project (about 45 min each time). These observations were spread out over the length of the project in order to capture differences across time and in differing conditions (such as weather and number of salamanders found). The same groups of children were observed at different points in time enabling us to note changes between children's first, second, and third (final) participation. While the first of these observations was a general observation of the learning environment, the following were participant observations allowing us to experience the hands-on work, mingle with the children and ask informal questions. This participant observation was helpful because it allowed the children to become familiar with us before being interviewed. Detailed notes were taken after each observation in order to have a written record to refer back to.

Lastly, we attended the local 'Salamander Evening' as participant observers (see **Table 1**). This is an annual community event at the pond in Olovslunds Park where Stockholm biologists give an informal talk about the project, thank the school for their work, and proceed, with the help of all people present (children and adults), to count the salamanders in the pond.

The general aim of these observations was to witness the unfolding of the conservation project in its fullness to better understand what it embodied from the point of view of the participants (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011). We took note of what the children did, how they did it (e.g., with what level of engagement/concentration and what type of body language), what they talked about while participating, what the atmosphere was, and how these attributes changed over time. The observations acted as springboards for developing interview questions as well as a means to verify themes and/or insights that emerged from interview and questionnaire data (Patton, 2002).

### Salamander Project Questionnaire

Students completed a short questionnaire after completion of the Salamander Project (June 2015) during regular class time (see **Table 1**). Questions were designed to mostly collect information on nominal level data (e.g., 'Pick three words that best describe the Salamander project for you'), mixed with certain questions of more 'closed' character (e.g., 'How many salamanders did you find in total?') (Appendix B). As mentioned above, questionnaires enabled a larger sample size for us than the interviews (n = 57 vs. 25 in 2015 and n = 49 vs. 24 in 2017), which was helpful in determining whether emergent interview patterns were consistent across data sources.

### Semi-Structured Face-to-Face Interviews

During the final days of the project, 25 children who had participated in the project were interviewed (see **Table 1**). Selection criteria for the interviews (Appendix C) were based on: (1) full parental consent to interview, record and use their child's quotes; (2) an even spread of students across the three classes so as to account for the possibility of a teacher's pedagogical influence on children's views about nature/the project; (3) equal gender representation; and (4) a variety in the number of times children had participated in the project (two to five times).

The purpose of the interviews was to uncover the experience of participating in the project from the children's perspective, and to understand whether it strengthened their affective relationships with nature. The focus was on how it felt to be part of the project, what changes (if any) they had experienced during the course of the project (changes in feelings toward salamanders and nature as well as changes in themselves) and what they had learnt

from it. Interviews were conducted in an informal manner in a comfortable setting (one-on-one, in Swedish, at school during school time) and, given the age of the participants, were kept short (10 min). Interviews were semi-structured following an interview guide (Appendix D), at the same time allowing the conversation to follow its natural course and for new questions to arise spontaneously (Kvale, 1996; Patton, 2002).

#### Data Collection Wave 2 – Spring 2017

The second wave of data collection occurred exactly 2 years later, in spring 2017, when the participants were in sixth grade and their final months of Olovslund School (see **Table 1**). This round of data collection consisted in 24 interviews (of the same nature as in 2015: short, one-on-one, at school and during school time, see Appendix F) and a questionnaire. The focus for both the interviews and questionnaire was on: (1) what the children remembered/retained and what they had learnt from their participation in the Salamander project in 2015; (2) whether their view of salamanders, other animals and nature had changed/shifted with the project and if so, how; and (3) whether or not they feel their connection to nature had changed with their time in the project and, if so, how.

The questionnaire was a combination of open-ended and box-checking questions (Appendix E). The 24 interviewees were selected evenly across the three classrooms, and were a mixture of children that had previously been interviewed in 2015 and those that hadn't (Appendix C). Hence, a mixture of children researched on both waves of data collection and those only partaking 1 year formed part of our unit of analysis. This unit was chosen because we wanted our unit of analysis to represent a fair gender balance and simply for practical reasons (voluntary to participate), and also to explore a wide range of views. In 2017 no observations took place, as the participants did not take part in the Salamander Project (a fourth-grade activity only).

### Analysis of Data

Interviews from both waves of data collections were transcribed verbatim and coded for emerging themes, using the software program Dedoose (version 6.2.17). Quotes were then translated into English. Coding was done in two ways. Firstly, in terms of exploring qualitative aspects of affective relationships with nature, we coded the interview data for three of the four subconstructs of connection to nature as developed by Cheng and Monroe (2012): enjoyment of nature, empathy for creatures and sense of responsibility. The fourth sub-construct (sense of oneness) did not work well for this age group in our opinion.

Secondly, we were interested in exploring the conservation project's specific features that appeared to have facilitated the development of affective relationships. Here, coding was done in terms of emergent themes that surface from analysis of the interview data—an iterative process that required several rounds of analysis. The written texts from the children in the questionnaire data were first translated into English and then analyzed looking for recurring themes with the help of the software program NVivo (version 11) and the website Woodle. Themes that emerged from any of the data sources were compared with our other data sources whenever feasible. For example, interview codes were considered when analyzing questionnaire data and vice versa, leading to code/theme refining. Additional gray and scientific literature, informal written and verbal conversations with the children's teachers, the local biologist and the teacher in charge of the project, were equally analyzed in light of themes that emerged from primary data.

### RESULTS

Interview and questionnaire results from 2015 point to a selfobserved change in children's connection to nature after project participation. This change was described as a positive one: increased concern, interest in and/or care for nature. Answering interview questions about how they had changed with the project, 16 children (out of 25) expressed increased empathy toward salamanders ('feeling' and 'caring' more for them). They explained that they had developed a better understanding for salamanders, both in terms of facts about them (e.g., how to differentiate amongst species and sex), but also how to 'help' and 'care for' them. An emergent finding from our empirical material was that 17 children (out of 25) noted that they had learnt more. Furthermore, in the questionnaire, 93% of children answered 'yes' to caring more about salamanders after the project than before. When talking about changes in how they felt toward salamanders and changes in themselves many children talked about going from not knowing or caring much about these amphibians to being closer to them, much more aware of them and thinking more about them:

I have more — okay, respect is a big word but I have to use it because there isn't another one — respect for how they [salamanders] live because it's quite. . . I wouldn't survive if I were a salamander!. . . Now I see them in a different way. Before I thought they were like animals. Now it's like they are beings that, well, they need help, just like people can need help sometimes. (Participant 1) We got to know them.

(Participant 11)

Shifting experiences of touching the species in question was an emergent theme from the interviews. In time, several children got over their initial fear of touching salamanders. Eight children experienced a change from being scared of, or nervous about salamanders, or finding them 'creepy,' to feeling more comfortable with them and daring to hold them as this following quote depicts:

Interviewer: Do you think that you have changed with the project?

Participant 4: Umm. . . before, I was a bit scared of salamanders. They were, like, a bit slimy. I didn't dare to hold one and now I can hold one without any problem. . . I have, like, stopped being scared of them.

This increased 'connection' to salamanders was mirrored by strengthened relationships with nature in a broader, more openended sense. Children typically expressed thinking and caring

more about other animals as well as about nature (in the wider meaning of the concept) after the project. The following quotes exemplify common answers to the question 'Do you think you have changed with the project?'

I have learnt to take care of animals. I'm maybe thinking about doing something like that maybe. . . to fix things so that everything is good with nature.. . . Yes. . . I have become more nature-friendly. (Participant 6)

Yes, well, I have much more of a sense for nature and salamanders.

(Participant 3)

That's a hard question!... Well, I have started to think more about animals and nature. Actually a lot more than what I did before.

(Participant 25)

Well, it's like I'm less scared and I feel more... confident in nature.

(Participant 23)

The main result from 2017 shows that the affective relationships that formed in 2015 remain. When asked directly if they cared about salamanders and if they would help a salamander if they saw someone hurting it, all interviewees answered 'yes.' The vast majority of children expressed that their feelings toward salamanders had changed with the project, reflected in an increased empathy toward salamanders (83% of interviewees), as the following quote from 2017 expresses:

Interviewer: Did your feelings for salamanders change with your time in the project? Participant 23: Yes they did actually. I hardly knew what a

salamander was before the project so. . . they have. I know what a salamander is now and I care more about them!

Even as 12 or 13-year-olds, in 2017, the majority of children (71%) expressed that the Salamander Project had changed the way they view other animals: they think and care more about them as well. Also, the majority of children (75% of interviewees, 54% of questionnaire respondents) confirmed that their view of nature (in the broader sense) had changed with the Salamander Project: it had helped them understand how important nature is and particularly how important it is for animals. Some children had more place-connected answers, thinking more of nature as a home for salamanders since the project, or explaining that their view of nature as a whole hadn't changed, but that their view of the specific salamander habitat had.

As the findings above show, the Salamander Project has helped children relate to salamanders but also to other animals (albeit to a lesser extent) and even to nature (in a more theoretical, less concrete way). This is further confirmed by the answers to the question 'Do you feel you, as a person, have changed with the Salamander Project, and, if so, how?' Out of the 79% of interviewees who answered yes, the vast majority of answers were salamander-specific (i.e., I care more about salamanders now), followed by animal-specific answers (i.e., I think more about animals now), and lastly answers that were about nature or something broad (i.e., I am more careful now, I know more about nature now). Indicators of shared memories include that 75% of interviewees in 2017 had thought about salamanders or the project, and 83% had talked about salamanders or the project during the last 2 years. When asked to recount their memories, interviewees spoke fondly about the project and 83% thought that they would remember it when they are older. An indicator that emerged from our empirical material of increased sensitivity toward salamanders is that 91% of interviewees had observed salamanders in the nearby surroundings during the 2 years that had passed.

### Participating in Something of Significance With a Sense of Responsibility

Children highly valued being 'part of' the project, being given the opportunity to 'participate' in or be 'included' in an important real-world project. For example, the contributing/helping aspect of the project (the word 'saving' was recurrent in both interviews and questionnaires) emerged as important for the children not only in terms of physically helping salamanders, but also with regards to having a role in the wider community by helping the municipality with its duty of biodiversity protection. This finding is supported by situated learning that stresses the importance of goal-driven activity for meaningful learning (Chawla, 2006; Durning and Artino, 2011).

Participant 21: I think it's really nice that we can help out. . .. The teacher explained that. . . only our school has permission to take the great crested newts and I think that that's pretty cool.

Interviewer: It is!

Participant 21: And we can talk about it later when we are big, to our children.

Being part of a 'bigger' project and community context (participating in an adult activity, beyond school) gave children a sense of importance, responsibility and pride. Children clearly expressed their sense of responsibility toward the Salamander Project and their appreciation for being given this responsibility. This was apparent throughout the interviews but was also recognized by the teachers who noticed how committed their students were to the project and the sense of importance that stemmed from it. This was further confirmed by observations in the field of children's careful concentration and thoroughness in the tasks (**Figure 3**).

Children talked about how things changed over the course of the project and how they had an increasing amount of responsibility, as the teacher trusted them to do the job well. One student called this 'freedom with responsibility' (Participant 25). This increased responsibility, trust and freedom allowed the children to get closer to and be sensitized to the salamanders in their own time and manner, and also to gain increased skills by repeatedly performing the tasks.

FIGURE 3 | Developing affective relationships with nature by way of significant experiences when saving the life of an animal, here by handling the species: carrying a great crested newt in one's hand. Photo: Martina Kiibus.

Well it was nice that she [the teacher] didn't come and watch over us, rather she thought we could do it and we could! We had to take responsibility but it was, like, fun to have it. (Participant 9)

Results from 2017, show, just like in 2015, that children valued 'participating in,' 'being part of,' and contributing to an activity they felt was useful and important. Having responsibility in a bigger-than-school project was still seen in many instances as something special or different, as exemplified by the following quote from 2017:

It felt important. It felt like we were helping out and that it was important. (Participant 30)

### The Project Provided Authentic Situations

An emergent finding was the importance of the fact that the project was a real, on-the-ground conservation project. That was highly appreciated by the children and the teacher in charge also reported that the children appreciated connecting with living organisms during authentic situations. Had it been set up as a normal 'school' project, she explained, they would have made sure to place salamanders in the wading pool daily to be found by the students. Instead, being an authentic project, located within the salamander migration corridor, one never knew what one would find and while most days some salamanders were found, (the record find was 70 although the usual find was less than 10), there were also days when none were found (Appendix A).

We found two specific features that illustrate how the Salamander Project provided authentic situations: its complex nature and the variability of conditions. Firstly, the Salamander Project was established as a social-ecological solution to the issue of a protected species dying because of a socially valued wading pool. The pool was the 'death-trap' located inside the natural breading ground of the salamanders, but this 'trap' also afforded the conservation of native species by children. Although a more effective strategy may have been to remove the pool entirely, authorities were unwilling to do so due to its high recreational and aesthetic value, resulting in the current solution and its reliance on Olovslund School. This situation also provided the children with a rich opportunity to reflect on the pros and cons of this arrangement. When asked what their preferred solution to the paddling pool 'trap' would be, their answers typically conveyed a clear understanding of the complexity of the issue:

Well, on the one hand it would be good to take it away so that no salamanders could fall in it at night but it is still pretty fun to play in the wading pool in the summer. On the one hand, it would be good to remove it but on the other hand it's really fun for us to keep the project up, that we, Olovslund School, can save salamanders. (Participant 9)

Secondly, the different and varying conditions of each participation in the project (e.g., number of salamanders found, weather, group dynamics, unexpected events) expanded opportunities for reflection and meaning-making. This finding was first identified from field observations and then followed up in interview questions. An example of this was when the children found a dead headless salamander. This allowed them to think about what could have happened to it and, with the help of the teacher, brainstorm which animals prey on salamanders. Another example is of finding a juvenile salamander in the pool. This allowed the children to see for themselves how it is impossible to identify the sex of a juvenile and provided the teacher with a good opportunity to explain salamanders' lifecycle. These kinds of unique events, with each occurrence depending entirely on the particular conditions of the day, allowed for spontaneous opportunities to enrich children's overall experience of the project.

Experiencing different and varying conditions was enabled by the projects' length (2 months), which may have influenced how the children became familiar with the salamanders and the tasks involved in the project. Indeed, when asked about the differences between the first and last time in the project, 15 children (out of 25) described how they had gotten more used to the project, felt

more confident in the tasks, and knew more about the scope of the project as well as about salamanders.

The 2017 interviews revealed, again, the extent to which the children recalled the project's authentic situations, as something very special. Students talked enthusiastically about moments during the project that were unusual or surprising such as finding a baby salamander or a dead salamander, or a particular time when very many salamanders were found. These types of moments were made possible due to the ever-changing conditions provided by the conservation project, which also seemed to have enabled enjoyable and exciting experiences.

### Fun and Excitement

All but one of the children interviewed in 2015 considered the project 'fun' and readily expressed the enjoyment they got from it. The 2015 questionnaire showed that 'fun' was chosen by 66% of children as one of the three words that best described the project for them. Although the project took place during lunch break (meaning that children skipped their usual break activities), 91% of questionnaire respondents said that it didn't feel like they had lost a break. Field observations and informal conversations with the students' teachers supported interview and questionnaire results. The teachers noted the joy and enthusiasm their students got out of the project, particularly evident directly after their turn participating. This quote captures these findings:

It's fun to feel that you have done something important. Something that is actually good for the environment, something that makes a difference. (Participant 1)

Children gave several reasons for why the project was 'fun' of which the most common were: having responsibility, being included in something 'big' and the fact that the project was 'real.' This 'fun' element is therefore tightly linked to the other features described previously. The different descriptions of why the project was 'fun' suggest that this word has a multi-dimensional meaning for these children, encompassing many positive and complementary qualities.

In 2017, all children interviewed expressed the enjoyment that they got from the project, making this the aspect of the experience that appeared to have stuck most vividly in their memory. The 2017 questionnaire results confirmed this finding, as 94% answered that they had liked taking part, and 69% used the word 'fun' to describe their experiences. An emergent finding was that 'helping' was the most common reason for why children enjoyed the project (51%). It was fun to help/save salamanders (the most common answer) but also to 'help out,' to help animals and to help nature. The second most common explanation for it being fun was because it was interesting (20.4%).

### Self-Reflection on Methodological Approach and Results

Our methodological approach has some important limitations that need to be mentioned. One significant study limitation relates to the challenge of children age 10 or 11 having to translate their experiences into words. We understand if readers cannot ascertain whether our findings are related more to changes in skills in for instance handling of salamanders, or to changes in deep seated emotional components of connection to nature (Kals et al., 1999; Cheng and Monroe, 2012). To mitigate this methodological weakness, we tried to verify patterns that emerged from interview data by using (1) observations of behavior in the field; (2) questionnaires; and (3) interviewing the children 2 years later when their verbal skills are more developed (see **Table 1**). Participant observations detected change in children's feelings toward salamanders, as much as is possible from an observation (feelings are, of course, deeply internal and personal and cannot be conveyed entirely 'outwardly' through, for example, actions, facial expressions, body language or verbally). Through examining these characteristics, however, we did detect that children (1) became more comfortable with handling salamanders (some children went from being scared of them and finding them 'yucky' to being unafraid and finding them 'normal' or even 'sweet'); and (2) showed more interest in and affection toward them. The questionnaire results pointed to a self-observed positive change in children's feelings toward (as well as knowledge of) both salamanders and nature. Patterns from the first wave of interviews were also apparent in the second wave of interviews 2 years later. In fact, we observed that, in 2017, the children (now 12 or 13 years old) expressed themselves in a considerably more concise way and with greater ability to discuss and reflect upon their experience in the project, which reaffirms our findings and increases their credibility.

Here we considered respondents from both waves of data collection, and those that were interviewed only one of the years as the same unit of analysis. We analyzed differences in views and meanings in the empirical material and no deviating patterns were found in responses from children that were studied during both 2015 and 2017, and those studied only in 2017. We acknowledge, however, that not restricting the unit of analysis to participants that took part in both waves of data collection limits our evidence concerning changes in affective relationships with nature at the individual level, compared to a strict 'within person research design.' We also acknowledge that ample room exists for developing better tools and methods for gathering data both on learning as embodied in, and produced through, practice and to capture changes in affective relationships in this age group. Furthermore, the qualitative nature of the study, in combination with the limited number of children available for investigation, means that our findings are not deemed general beyond the context of this study, which is why we phrase our results as indicative rather than conclusive.

### DISCUSSION

The main finding is that learning through taking part in a local species conservation project (the Salamander Project) during school hours was associated with strengthened connection to nature and, specifically, to the salamander species. We observed a self-reported new and personal meaning for the children who expressed both increased empathy for the species in question and an increased concern for nature. These findings are consistent

with previous work (Louv, 2005; Chawla, 2006; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016). However, we build on existing theory by demonstrating that these new affective relationships with nature can persist over time. The main result from 2017 shows that the strengthened affective relations observed in 2015 remain, as represented by the self-reported change in connection to nature. This shift was more discernible in 2017 when the participants were 12–13 years of age: they showed deeper reflection and talked more about the consequences of their actions, compared with when they were 10 or 11 years old.

We have no causal evidence, and there may be a plurality of explanations for why such a shift persisted (Bogner, 1998; Liddicoat and Krasny, 2013), but previous literature has showed that the developmental phase of the children likely played a part in enabling a shift in affective relationships with nature (e.g., Liefländer and Bogner, 2018). Sobel (1993) argues that the ages between 6 and 11 are particularly important for children to form relationships with nature, and for understanding themselves in relation to nature. Liefländer and Bogner (2014) found that children older than 11 years of age tend to experience nature mainly through social relations, whereas children younger than 11 seem to experience nature mainly through exploration and direct sensory contact. Indeed, the fourth graders in this study were at a stage in their developmental process where they also began to experience the natural world indirectly by participation in social action. For example, in 2017 the children showed signs of being closer to puberty and more tuned into 'the social.'

In the following sections, we discuss our findings with reference to situated learning and affordance theories. Such a theoretical frame is used when responding to the how and why lines of inquiry in this manuscript. We further relate our insights with challenges in urban sustainability. For this we use three sub-headings:

Exploration and experience under authentic situations; The culture of the behavioral setting; Counteracting broad-based processes toward weaker connection to nature.

### Exploration and Experience Under Authentic Situations

We interpret from our data a dynamic development of increased competence in stewardship actions. The behavioral setting of the Salamander Project enabled the children to move around relatively freely (crawl, walk, and run) and explore the salamander habitat, which we theoretically link to interactive cycles of learning-by-doing (cf. Kyttä, 2004). Such interactive cycles have been characterized by a safe world for learning constituted of responsive affordances and graduated challenges that children learn to master. As children move around and explore affordances and features of the environment, and as they overcome challenges in their environment, they build environmental sensitivity and at the same time personal competence (Kyttä, 2004; Chawla, 2006; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016). We observed positive interactive cycles of exploring the area while developing abilities over time. Under shifting situations, children were searching in the piles of leaves with a stick; finding, discovering, holding the animals in their hands; carrying and releasing salamanders into the nearby pond, and watering the piles of leaves before leaving the park, so that the salamanders falling into the pool during the night would not dry out (**Figure 4**).

Interpreted through the lens of situated learning, such learning-by-doing activities are inseparable from experience (Brown et al., 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Barab and Roth, 2006). Significant sensory experiences observed include overcoming initial feelings of disgust for salamanders, shifting to emotions of empathy. Experiences of taking part in something important, and feelings of responsibility, pride and having fun were also reported. Significant sensory experiences have been identified as important transformative moments since these may create long-term effects on environmental commitment (Chawla, 2001, 2007). In environmental education, it is argued that children's connection to nature can become strengthened as a complex ability that can come about through a series of situations that generate significant sensory experiences (Chawla, 1998; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016; Giusti et al., 2018).

Unlike a typical school activity, the Salamander Project afforded first-hand sensory explorations during authentic situations. Reflective, emotional and physiological experiences were intertwined with learning about salamanders as a species, their behavior, their habitat requirements, and how to personally

FIGURE 4 | Illustration of the authentic situation of the Salamander Project. Fourth graders searching for salamanders in a pile of leaves in the wading pool during the lunch break on a chilly spring day. Consent received from parents of the children. Photo: Sophie Belton.

relate to them. Therefore, the uncertainty inherent in the project may have been an important factor that engaged children to create stronger affective relationships with nature (Chawla et al., 2014; Moore, 2014). Moore (2014) calls the variation in environmental factors 'sufficient unpredictability' and understands this as important in maintaining a child's fascination and attention (see also Chawla et al., 2014). The Salamander Project provides a good example of its unpredictable nature upholding a child's excitement for, and interest in, stewardship practices.

Our rich qualitative data suggest that whole situations of sufficient unpredictability, triggering free exploration of the area, direct sensory contact and significant experiences of interacting with species, had a role in enabling children's development of affective relationships with the salamander species and with nature in an open-ended sense. The sensory interaction was observed to enrich the children's immediate experiential feedback about the effects of their actions. Heft and Chawla (2006) report that such feedback may be perceived if children are allowed, and are able, to shape features of the physical environment and experience with all five senses changes in their environment as a result of their actions. Here saving the lives of trapped animals gave them such feedback, which in turned seemed to have triggered interactive cycles of: direct sensory interaction, experiential feedback about the effects of actions, increased understanding, and development of new skills for dynamically exploring further ways of saving species. These observations support previous work on links between learning and sensory experiences in nature-based activity (Kyttä, 2002; Chawla, 2007; Chawla et al., 2014; Moore, 2014; Giusti et al., 2014; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016).

#### The Culture of the Behavioral Setting

Behavioral settings are recurring patterns of behavior in designated places where people gather to engage in particular activities at particular times (Barker, 1968). The culture of stewardship in this school played a part in teaching the children about the accepted norms and values of the project, which also seemed to have played a part in the actualisation of affordances congruent with stewardship behavior. Indeed, most students participated even though it was not compulsory to do so. The social interactions that occur within these settings are constituted by social cues upheld by the communities in question (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Any individual member of a community of practice is affected by such social structures (Wenger, 1998), which form part in the shaping of choices (Linder et al., 2018), which further may re-constitute the behavioral setting in question. Indeed, the Salamander Project has been running for 10 years and has become a part of the school's culture and identity, embedded in the school's routines and engaging not only the fourth graders, but also teachers. The particular school values and pride around this project, where the school logo is a salamander and the project is mentioned on its website, appear to have encouraged children's commitment to the project.

The behavioral setting also seemed to have made pupils stay attuned during the entire 2-month period, despite the fact that the actual amount of hands-on participation time was relatively short: on average 2.25 h per child (3 × 45-min sessions). Between the hands-on engagement, they were, however, involved in social action that potentially could remind them of the project. They studied the salamander data records and took part in classroom teaching about the species and its habitat. Despite the project running over a 2-month period, the teachers continued to talk about the project regularly after lunch asking students about the daily finds. Furthermore, not all children participated at the same time (one small group of children per day), but even the days when they did not participate, friends would return to the schoolyard with their stories to tell about the 'catch of the day.' Such social feedback meant that interest and involvement (even if by proxy) in the project seemed to have been kept alive. Also, the Salamander Evening (a ceremony outside school hours) seemed to have functioned as a sort of 'memory' (Barthel et al., 2010), which potentially reminded them of their part in the project. The Salamander Evening also seemed to have played a part in instilling a sense of pride in partaking in a 'bigger-than-school' societal activity. Indeed, previous research suggests that experiences of intimate interaction with nature in educational behavioral settings provide children with important learning opportunities, including actions that may help shape their relations with, and knowledge about, biodiversity (Chawla, 2001; Fjørtoft, 2004; Herbert, 2008; Ernst and Tornabene, 2012; Beery and Jørgensen, 2016).

Multiple co-benefits of the project became apparent through observations and conversations with the teachers. These included: improved science learning, the spread of local species knowledge (often from child to parent), and increased interest in the wider community. In this sense, the project can be viewed as a driver of important processes within, and a component of, a larger social-ecological system. This finding is supported by resilience scholars and reinforces their view that environmental education and learning should not be viewed in isolation from building resilient social-ecological urban systems but as an integrated and necessary part of it (Krasny et al., 2010; Russ and Krasny, 2017).

#### Counteracting Broad-Based Processes Toward Weaker Connection to Nature

In terms of practical policy advice, this paper shows that involving 10 and 11-year-old children in authentic stewardship actions as an activity at school, while urban planners consider potential for learning in nature environments in close proximity to schools and kindergartens, may be a promising combination for societies to counteract broad-based processes toward weaker connection to nature (Giusti et al., 2014, 2018). Obligatory stewardship projects during school hours can be implemented more broadly in a society compared to projects that are voluntary after school. Such obligatory policy may be a necessary step if urban civilisation will stay emotionally connected to the biosphere, while simultaneously fostering social health and pleasurable feedback cycles between children and nature (Chawla et al., 2014; Chawla, 2015; Carrus et al., 2015; Collado and Staats, 2016; Samuelsson et al., 2018). As the result herein is indicative, more research is needed in order to generalize whether such policy advice has the potential to function as a deep leverage point, by supporting much needed sustainability transitions of broad-based socio-cultural processes of self-concept change and social norm formation (Meadows, 2008; Westley et al., 2011; Abson et al., 2017; Görg et al., 2017).

### CONCLUSION

fpsyg-09-00928 June 7, 2018 Time: 18:54 # 12

Our findings support Cheng and Monroe's (2012) suggestion that learning, understanding, and experiencing nature are all factors that can positively influence the development of a child's connection to nature, here operationalized as an affective connection. This paper also develops, with emphasis put on the participants' own views and words, an understanding about how, and by which means, the participating children's connection to nature shifted over time. The study highlights:

The affective relationships that the children formed with the salamander species and with nature in an open-ended sense, seemed to have emanated from whole and authentic situations that granted the children immediate feedback about the effects of their actions when saving the lives of trapped animals. Such situations triggered positive interactive feedback cycles of direct sensory interaction, experiential feedback as well as social feedback about the effects of actions, increased understanding, and development of new skills for dynamically exploring further ways of saving species—self-reported to generate significant and fun experiences. These complex and relational dynamics between mind, body, culture and the environment have been reported elsewhere (Kyttä, 2002, 2004; Raymond et al., 2017), but not often in the context of children's conservation of protected species inside an urban landscape.

### ETHICS STATEMENT

Ethical implications of this study were carefully considered prior to fieldwork. Although the topic is not deemed to be of a sensitive nature, the study involved children and therefore followed specific guidelines relating to researching children (Graue and Walsh, 1998; The Research Ethics Guidebook, 2014; UNICEF guidelines for interviewing children, 2014). Furthermore, an ethical review of the research project was carried out by education staff of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University as a requirement. The protocol was approved by them.

All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Firstly, background police checks were provided to all schools involved once relevant teachers and/or principals had agreed to participate in the study. Secondly, an information letter and a consent form were sent out to all 4th grade students' and 6th grade students' parents/caregivers. The letter explained what the study involved, the terms of student confidentiality and anonymity, as well as how the data would be handled. Consent was asked for their child's participation in both: (1) the classroom sessions and (2) recorded interviews where quotes could be used. Fieldwork commenced only once consent forms were collected and involved only those students whose caregivers had given consent.

Participants were met at all times with respect and study methods were adapted to the specific age groups and chosen so as to be fun and engaging activities in a familiar atmosphere (their school). Before being interviewed, students were explained that their participation was fully voluntary and that they didn't have to answers questions if they chose not to. They were encouraged to ask questions and were explained both prior to the classroom sessions and interviews that there were no 'right' or 'wrong' answers but that we were instead interested in their personal views and feelings.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

SBa was the project leader and the corresponding author. SBe did most of the field-work and did together with SBa most of the writing. MG participated in some of the early field work 2015, and he contributed with discussing the theoretical view-points together with CR.

### FUNDING

This study was supported by ZEUS – Spatial and Experiential Analyzes for Urban Social Sustainability. FORMAS, Dnr: 2016- 01193.

### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to all children, parents, and teachers of Olovslund School in Bromma who shared their experiences with us. We thank the Formas supported project called ZEUS (ref no.: 2016- 01193) of which the results herein are a part. We thank Prof. Patrik Sörqvist for advice. We would also like to thank the University of Gävle, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics for funding part of this work.

### SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg. 2018.00928/full#supplementary-material

### REFERENCES

fpsyg-09-00928 June 7, 2018 Time: 18:54 # 13

Kahn, P., and Kellert, S. (2002). Children and Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** 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.

Copyright © 2018 Barthel, Belton, Raymond and Giusti. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Are California Elementary School Test Scores More Strongly Associated With Urban Trees Than Poverty?

#### Heather Tallis1 \*, Gregory N. Bratman2 , Jameal F. Samhouri3 and Joseph Fargione4

1 The Nature Conservancy, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, 2 School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, 3 Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, United States, 4 The Nature Conservancy, Minneapolis, MN, United States

Unprecedented rates of urbanization are changing our understanding of the ways in which children build connections to the natural world, including the importance of educational settings in affecting this relationship. In addition to influencing human-nature connection, greenspace around school grounds has been associated with benefits to students' cognitive function. Questions remain regarding the size of this benefit relative to other factors, and which features of greenspace are responsible for these effects. We conducted a large-scale correlative study subsampling elementary schools (n = 495) in ecologically, socially and economically diverse California. After controlling for common educational determinants (e.g., socio-economic status, race/ethnicity, student teacher ratio, and gender ratio) we found a significant, positive association between test scores and tree and shrub cover within 750 and 1000 m of urban schools. Tree and shrub cover was not associated with test scores in rural schools or five buffers closer to urban schools (10, 50, 100, 300, and 500 m). Two other greenspace variables (NDVI and agricultural area) were not associated with test performance at any of the analyzed buffer distances for rural or urban schools. Minority representation had the largest effect size on standardized test scores (8.1% difference in scores with 2SD difference in variable), followed by tree and shrub cover around urban schools, which had a large effect size (2.9–3.0% at 750 and 1000 m) with variance from minority representation and socioeconomic status (effect size 2.4%) included. Within our urban sample, average tree-cover schools performed 4.2% (3.9–4.4, and 95% CI) better in terms of standardized test scores than low tree-cover urban schools. Our findings support the conclusion that neighborhood-scale (750–1000 m) urban tree and shrub cover is associated with school performance, and indicate that this element of greenspace may be an important factor to consider when studying the cognitive impacts of the learning environment. These results support the design of experimental tests of tree planting interventions for educational benefits.

#### Edited by:

Stephan Barthel, Gävle University College, Sweden

#### Reviewed by:

John Everett Marsh, Gävle University College, Sweden Jason Duvall, University of Michigan, United States

> \*Correspondence: Heather Tallis<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 15 August 2017 Accepted: 09 October 2018 Published: 29 October 2018

#### Citation:

Tallis H, Bratman GN, Samhouri JF and Fargione J (2018) Are California Elementary School Test Scores More Strongly Associated With Urban Trees Than Poverty? Front. Psychol. 9:2074. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02074

Keywords: attention restoration theory, ecosystem services, conservation, urban green space, education

### INTRODUCTION

fpsyg-09-02074 October 25, 2018 Time: 15:3 # 2

In response to the limited nature contact that many humans experience in modern life, research has brought an increased focus to the ways in which children form relationships with the natural world. Recent efforts include the development of a framework describing the locations and specificities of the processes underlying the nurturing of these connections (Giusti et al., 2018). Specific pathways for the development of child-nature connections have been described in urban environmental education settings (Delia and Krasny, 2018), including how affective connections can develop with animal life on elementary school grounds (Barthel et al., 2018). In addition to increasing connection and care for the natural world, research on the association between nature contact and education has documented that outdoor learning and play can improve student academic performance (Tranter and Malone, 2004; Matsouka, 2010). This contact can include many different types of interaction with nature, such as outdoor active learning, engagement with school gardens or the viewing of nature from a window. Previous studies have shown that viewing of nature may increase attention, memory and impulse inhibition, and decrease stress (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Bratman et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2015).

A prominent environmental psychology theory called Attention Restoration Theory (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Lee et al., 2015) posits that our directed attention is overtaxed by the sensory demands of urban environments. In these contexts, to adequately focus on relevant stimuli, cognitive resources must be engaged to block out unrelated distractions. In contrast, natural environments typically provide opportunities for a replenishment of this directed attention, due to the greater engagement of involuntary attention and the associated restorative processes that these environments encourage. Perceived restorative qualities of nature include visual and auditory stimuli (Levain et al., 2015; Krzywicka and Byrka, 2017), and the replenishment of directed attention can be measured via improved performance on certain types of cognitive performance tasks, including those that involve working memory, impulse inhibition, and other capacities. Thus, certain types of nature experience may be most impactful in urban settings where demands on an individual's directed attention capacities are most acute, as they work to block out large amounts of urban stimuli (noise, vehicular traffic, etc.).

Research is underway regarding the association of nature exposure with cognitive benefits, including how widespread and large the impacts are, which features of greenspace are most impactful, and at what spatial scale. Studies in this area vary across social and ecological contexts (Tanner, 2009; Bratman et al., 2012; Wu et al., 2014; Dadvand et al., 2015), but only a subset place the relative association of greenspace with test scores in the context of other variables shown to influence student performance. Such variables include socio-economic status (SES) of an individual student, or of peers (Coleman et al., 1996; Caldas and Bankston, 1997; Agirdag et al., 2012; Wu et al., 2014), class size (Finn and Achilles, 1999), teacher experience (Henry et al., 1999), per-pupil expenditures (Hedges et al., 1994), race/ethnicity (Caldas and Bankston, 1997; Agirdag et al., 2012; Boonen et al., 2014), and elements of the school context including day lighting (Heschong Mahone Group, 1999; Tanner, 2009) and being in an urban versus rural setting (Wu et al., 2014).

While other correlative studies of greenspace and school performance commonly control for these other variables, they often do not compare the effect size of greenspace versus other predictors, making it difficult to interpret whether statistically significant findings are likely to be educationally meaningful. Two recent studies do report beta coefficients, showing that tree cover beta coefficients are about half as large as school level student socioeconomic status (the variable explaining most variance in both studies) (Hodson and Sander, 2017; Kweon et al., 2017). These findings provide indications that greenspace around schools may have an educationally meaningful influence on students relative to that of other education variables. While these studies sampled a relatively large number of schools (approximately 200 schools in each case), they have captured a limited range of ecological conditions [e.g., two dominant hardwood forest ecoregions across Massachusetts (Wu et al., 2014), two plains ecoregions in southeast Michigan (Matsouka, 2010), one forest ecoregion in Minnesota (Hodson and Sander, 2017), one plains ecoregion around Washington DC (Kweon et al., 2017), and an unidentifiable number of ecoregions in Georgia, though the state is dominated by one plains ecoregion and Piedmont (Tanner, 2009)].

In this study, we used an exploratory approach to examine a subset of Californian elementary schools to ask whether any of three different greenspace indicators at any of seven distances around schools had an association with school-level test scores. Staging the study in California allowed us to examine these associations across a large and socioeconomically diverse population and a diverse set of natural ecosystems. Our main question was whether any of these greenspace variables at any of our tested distances had an association similar to that of other known, strong determinants of student performance.

### MATERIALS AND METHODS

California was chosen as a study area because of its large and diverse human population, large degree of variation in social and economic conditions, and environmental heterogeneity. Working with data from 2012, we considered all public, private, magnet and charter schools, excluding small (<25 students in fifth grade), special education, and alternative schools. We focused on fifth grade students, as early childhood experience has been strongly linked to later-life outcomes including high school and higher education outcomes, income, socioeconomic status, health insurance coverage, crime and substance abuse (Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000). Although we could readily obtain test scores, school demographics and socio-economic information from all California schools, processing of satellite imagery to characterize school surroundings was time consuming, limiting the total number of schools we could analyze. From a total of 3,233 elementary schools, we chose a subset of 495 through stratified random sampling across student body SES, urban versus rural

setting and ecoregion. The California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) (California STAR, 2012) data set was used to define school type (e.g., private, public, and magnet), student body size in fifth grade, and the SES of the student body (% students on free or reduced lunch).

As the ART suggests that nature exposure may have a greater magnitude of impact in urban contexts (Tanner, 2009; Wu et al., 2014), we intentionally differentiated urban and rural schools in our sample set. The 2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification was used to define urban (population >2500) and rural schools (United States Census Bureau, 2010). The majority of schools in California are urban, so stratified sampling on this factor led to a high proportional sub-sampling of rural schools. Our final set of sample schools included 336 urban schools and 159 non-urban schools.

### Common and Greenspace Predictor Variables

We conducted our statistical analyses in two phases. First, we established how much variation in fifth grade student performance was explained by socio-economic factors commonly known to influence student achievement (described below in "common variables"). We then asked if considering the condition of greenspace around schools added explanatory power to models of student achievement (described below in "greenspace variables"). In all analyses, we used the California STAR data on student achievement from 2012 (California STAR, 2012). California conducts standardized tests in the subjects of science, mathematics and English language. Scores for these three subjects were highly correlated (Pearson correlation coefficients for all pairs >0.79, all p < 0.0001), so instead of treating them separately in statistical analysis, we added the scores of all three subjects into a single composite indicator of student achievement.

#### Common Variables

School achievement studies have established the importance of several across-school variables in determining student outcomes, including factors related to the socio-economic characteristics of the student body and to the school learning environment. Variables we included concerning the socio-economic character of the student body included indicators of SES, gender, and ethnicity. Key variables regarding the school environment included the student teacher ratio, urban versus rural settings, and solar irradiance. Enrollment data (number of students in each school) were available, but significantly correlated with student teacher ratio (Pearson correlation 0.41, p < 0.0001), so only student teacher ratio was included. Data on student body SES (represented by % student body on free or reduced school lunch programs), gender ratio, ethnicity and student teacher ratio were all taken from the California STAR data (California STAR, 2012).

We used two characterizations of ethnicity, as there are conceptual hypotheses for at least two different effects of cultural diversity on student outcomes. Some studies show a positive effect of peer ethnic diversity within a classroom (Agirdag et al., 2012), so we calculated an indicator of overall ethnic diversity following the Shannon-Weiner index to represent both number of ethnicities present in a school's fifth grade student body, and the evenness of representation across those ethnicities. A second hypothesis states that students from ethnicities under-represented in higher education will show poorer performance in earlier education, so we also included the percentage of students per school in under-represented minorities (all non-white and non-Asian categories). Ethnic classifications used in the source data set were American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Black, White, Hawaiian National/Pacific Islander, and two or more races.

To capture the range of daylight across the large range of latitude California occupies (almost 10 degrees latitude), we used average monthly mean horizontal irradiance (kWh m−2 d −1 ) data from the United States Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory. To capture irradiance over the school year, we averaged monthly values from September 2012 to May 2013 (Perez et al., 2009). Most correlations among established variables were weak (Pearson correlations <0.3) and none exceeded 0.43 (percent underrepresented minorities and irradiance; see (**Supplementary Table S5**).

To establish which of these commonly studied variables were consistently and strongly associated with mean school test scores, we used multi-model inference with a constrained set of models. Details of candidate models are described below.

#### Greenspace Variables

Controlling for common variables driving student achievement, we asked whether several aspects of greenspace around schools were associated with test scores. Previous studies have taken one of two approaches to defining the 'greenness' of school surroundings. Some focused on classroom views, and visited individual classrooms, applying a multi-criteria characterization to each classroom's view (Tanner, 2009; Matsouka, 2010). A second method has used remotely sensed data, allowing more rapid classification of a larger set of schools (Wu et al., 2014; Kweon et al., 2017). We expanded on previous remote sensing-based methods to explore three greenspace variables simultaneously.

#### **Greenness**

For 'greenness' we used the natural difference vegetation index (NDVI) as a descriptor of vegetation color in school surroundings. NDVI data were extracted from United States Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) 1 m resolution aerial photos. We used ArcGIS (ESRI) to compute NDVI from near-infrared and red spectral bands. Images reflect conditions from April 23–July 20, 2012, with the date range selected to encompass the time during which standardized testing takes place. In California, 2012 was a moderately dry year. The period of study falls within the dry season, so less variation is expected in NDVI, tree or shrub cover between drought and non-drought years since peak vegetation cover in most California ecoregions occurs outside the study window. In addition, the majority of grassy areas on California's

anthropogenic school grounds are irrigated, dampening the effect of seasonal wetness on vegetation greenness.

#### **Agricultural**

Crop fields can be as green as forests, so we included a variable to differentiate agricultural areas from non-agricultural areas. Using the same NAIP imagery we used an automated supervised classification to extract cropland features. Across the subset of selected schools, agricultural percent cover was not normally distributed, with a high proportion of schools having zero percent agricultural area in their surroundings (commensurate with the Census data showing a high proportion of urban schools in the study set). Given this skewed distribution, we converted agricultural percent cover to a binary variable and classified schools as having agriculture (>0% agriculture) or not having agriculture in their surroundings.

#### **Trees and shrubs**

Greenspace may vary in structure, or openness. Surroundings may be relatively un-structured, with fields or grasslands, or more structured with trees and shrubs. To reflect this variation in structure, we calculated the percentage of trees and shrubs around schools as a proxy, using the NAIP imagery. Image recognition software (ESRI ArcGIS) used spatial context, and spectral and pattern information to identify individual trees and shrubs around each school. Percent cover was calculated as the proportion of area occupied by trees or shrubs.

#### Buffer Distances

Choosing a distance to analyze is challenging, as the mechanism(s) for greenspace to impact learning is not known, and there is likely more than one, so a standard distance for impact is not obvious. If students are influenced by views, the active distance may be quite far in topographically complex areas (e.g., with tall mountain ranges) or quite limited in cities or areas with tall trees. Greenspace may impact students as they play outdoors on school grounds (near-school influence zone), while they commute to school or while at home (in both cases, near to far influence zone depending on home location).

Without clear means to identify mechanism in the present study, we chose buffers up to 1 km from schools because there are clear differences in policy interventions across that range of space. For example, significant affects associated with near-school buffers would imply that interventions on school grounds, such as gardens and greening school common areas could be beneficial. Alternatively, significant affects nearing the 1 km buffer distance imply a need for actions outside the school property, such as urban planning, greenspace or green belt creation, or other neighborhood greening programs. More rigorous treatment of the mechanism for learning benefits should be pursued in future studies.

Within the 1 km maximum buffer area, we delineated seven different buffer distances around each school at 10 m (which included all inter-building area for schools that have multiple buildings), 50, 100, 300, 500, 750, and 1000 m. To create school buffer zones, the building footprint of each elementary school was first delineated. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, building footprints were available from municipal government spatial data inventories. For all other schools, we manually digitized a polygon for each school encompassing the outer edges of all identifiable elementary school buildings present in the NAIP aerial photos. Buffers were created at each distance around each building polygon. The buffers were not sequential (e.g., 1000 m buffer representing area between 750 and 1000 m buffer), but instead, each buffer was inclusive of the full distance between the centroid of the school footprint polygon(s) and the outer buffer limit (e.g., the 1000 buffer included all area between the centroid of the building polygon and the 1000 m buffer extent).

A metric was then calculated for each greenspace variable in each school buffer zone. For greenness, the mean NDVI per buffer was calculated. For agriculture, the percentage of agricultural area in each buffer was calculated, then each buffer was re-coded in binary terms (agricultural and non-agricultural). Trees and shrubs were represented by the percent area within the buffer occupied by trees or shrubs. A small number of schools (n = 3) were dropped from analysis because school building locations could not accurately be determined.

#### Ecoregion

The final addition in this round of model selection was ecoregion. This was not a spatial variable calculated per school, but rather a single identifier assigned to each school, reflecting the ecoregion it resides in. California covers a large land area spanning nearly ten degrees of latitude (>1000 km) from north to south. This area encompasses dramatic ecological variability in 11 ecoregions, including two mountain ranges, massive deserts, extensive agricultural production regions, a coastal Mediterranean system, redwood and ponderosa forests and native grasslands. To account for this variation, we included ecoregion as a categorical variable, ordered from lowest to highest latitude.

### Model Selection Analyses

In the first round of model selection, we considered only the common variables described above. We compared sets of linear regression models predicting total student test scores as a function of established variables (R Development Core Team, 2009). Interpretations of regression coefficients are sensitive to the different scales of the input variables (e.g., student teacher ratio and minority representation). Therefore, each continuous predictor variable (SES, gender ratio, ethnic diversity, percent under-represented minorities, student teacher ratio) was standardized by subtracting the mean and dividing by two standard deviations, while binary predictor variables (urban/rural) were centered to a mean of zero. We constrained all model selection analyses to include socioeconomic status (Coleman et al., 1996; Caldas and Bankston, 1997; Agirdag et al., 2012), percent under-represented minorities (Coleman et al., 1996), and irradiance [proxy for daylight (Tanner, 2009)] as there is strong evidence that these predictor variables commonly have strong associations with student performance. We allowed all possible combinations of the other established predictors in addition to these three, for a total of 16 models. No interactions between variables were considered. We did not apply a familywise alpha as our focus was not on significance tests, but parsimony, general direction and effect sizes.

Model performance was compared based on corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc), and the best set of models was defined as those with delta AIC values <4.0 (Burnham et al., 2014). Common predictors appearing in 90% or more of the best model set were carried forward into the greenspace variable analysis. The common predictors that met this criteria were socioeconomic status and percent under-represented minorities.

In the second round of model selection, we asked if any greenspace variable at any buffer distance added significantly to the ability to describe student performance, controlling for common variables arising from round one. Each greenspace variable was considered separately to isolate the influence of different environmental characteristics on student performance. We constrained all model selection analyses to include the two variables from the first round of model selection that were carried forward (socioeconomic status and percent under-represented minorities). In addition to these two fixed variables, we allowed all possible combinations of urban/rural, greenspace, ecoregion and the interaction between greenspace and urban/rural (per ART, we hypothesized that associations would be significant in urban environments). This created a set of 10 possible models for each greenspace variable at each buffer distance.

Greenspace variables at all buffer distances were not highly correlated with common variables (most Pearson correlations <0.3, highest = 0.41, see (**Supplementary Table S6**). Given the highly heterogeneous correlation among greenspace variables and common variables at different distances, all were retained in model explorations. Greenspace variables were also weakly correlated with each other at all buffer distances (all Pearson correlations <0.35, see (**Supplementary Table S7**). Subsequent buffers were highly correlated within a single greenspace variable, which is to be expected as farther buffers are inclusive of the closer buffers (e.g., 500 m includes the 10, 50, 100, and 300 m data). NDVI buffers were most highly correlated with each other (Pearson correlations 0.53–0.99, most >0.7), followed by percent tree and shrub cover (Pearson correlations 0.36–0.99, most >0.7) and cropland cover (Pearson correlation 0.27–0.99, most >0.5). No two greenspace variables or buffer distances were ever combined in a single possible model. Variables were standardized and best performing models were identified as above.

#### RESULTS

### Common Variables in Student Performance

To compare the strength of greenspace effects to that of other common variables related to student performance, we first used multi-model inference to ask which combination of several common education variables significantly and parsimoniously explained average fifth grade student performance across a subset of California schools in 2012. Across the 16 models explored, urban/rural location, SES of the student body (% fifth graders on free or reduced lunch) and minority representation (% non-Asian and non-White students to

reflect historically under-represented minorities) were the only variables that consistently occurred in our best-fitting models (**Supplementary Table S1**, note we do not apply a familywise alpha), and had significant effect sizes (**Figure 1**). Pupil teacher ratio (highly correlated with class size), gender ratio, ethnic diversity (Shannon-Weiner index to reflect diversity and evenness across ethnicities), and daylight (solar irradiance) were considered, but were not chosen in our best models.

Test scores were generally higher in urban contexts, lower in schools with more students on free or reduced lunch (lower SES), and dramatically lower in schools with more historically under-represented minorities (**Figure 1**). Students at urban schools scored 31 points (2.3%) higher than students at rural schools on average. SES of the student body had a similar

effect size, with an increase in eligibility for free and reduced lunch from 17% (−1 SD) to 81% (+1 SD) of the student body associated with a 32 point decrease in test performance (2.4%). Minority representation had the largest effect size, roughly three times greater than urban/rural context and SES. Across a 56% (mean +/−1 SD) increase in representation, average student performance declined 100 points, or 7.4%. Hispanic students dominate under-represented minorities in our sample (75% of minorities), so this is largely a single group effect, the basis of which is discussed elsewhere (Hemphill et al., 2011).

These results generally align with other published findings. For example, a recent meta-analysis reported multiple studies showing a 1 SD difference in school level SES associated with a 0.04 to 0.25 SD difference in student test outcomes (van Ewijk and Sleegers, 2010). We found a 0.19 SD difference in test scores with a 1 SD difference in SES, within their reported range. Our best model accounted for 37% of variance in fifth grade scores across our sample of California schools, somewhat higher than previous studies (19.5–26%) (Coleman et al., 1996; Caldas and Bankston, 1997; Agirdag et al., 2012; Boonen et al., 2014).

### Greenspace Variables and Student Performance

In our best model using common variables, over half of the variance in average test scores was left unexplained. We used a second round of multi-model inference to examine whether adding variables of school greenspace explained some of the remaining test score variance. Three greenspace variables, along with ecoregion, were used to represent different features of 'naturalness.' In addition to main effects, we tested for an interaction between any greenspace variable at any distance and urban context. Per ART, we included these interactions on the basis of our hypothesis that the association of nature contact with increased test performance would be most likely to exist within urban environments, given the higher likelihood of students interacting with stimuli throughout their day that tax their directed attention (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Lee et al., 2015).

Fifth grade test scores were higher in urban schools with more trees and shrubs within 750 m (**Supplementary Table S2** and **Figure 2**) and 1000 m (**Supplementary Table S2** and **Supplementary Figure S1**). In line with other studies (e.g., Wu et al., 2014), this may be due to the fact that larger buffer distances more accurately capture the totality of nature exposure for students throughout their day (commutes from home to school, etc.).

This association was not present for rural schools (**Figure 2**). Tree and shrub cover was the only greenspace variable assessed that was significant at any distance (**Supplementary Tables S3, S4**, and **Supplementary Figures S2, S3**). Although we did not find a significant association in this sample, other studies in other contexts have found associations with the NDVI index and test scores (e.g., Wu et al., 2014; Dadvand et al., 2015). Our findings on this front were exploratory, and experiments, smaller-scale interventions, and other approaches are needed to help uncover possible underlying reasons why our tree and shrub cover factor

was significantly associated with test scores, while NDVI was not. With trees and shrubs, the best models at both 750 and 1000 m explained 42% of the variance, capturing 5% more variance than models with the common variables alone.

### DISCUSSION

From an educational policy and school-design perspective, our findings provide a foundation for further experimental work that could investigate whether the association between student performance and tree and shrub cover is causal. Such studies could explore whether an intervention as straightforward as planting trees and shrubs within relevant distances (750 and 1000 m) of urban schools could improve student performance.

Our correlative analyses were constructed to be exploratory, focusing on qualitative direction and effect sizes revealed (rather than significance, per se). The main findings suggest that the association between tree and shrub coverage may be on par

with the association of other common factors addressed by education policy, including smaller high schools (Barrow et al., 2015), physical activity breaks (Fedewa et al., 2015), and changes in schooling hour policies (Jez and Wassmer, 2015). After accounting for the effects of minority representation and SES, urban schools with higher surrounding tree and shrub cover had 3.0% higher scores (38.8 points at 750 m, 40.5 points at 1000 m). This difference in test scores is associated with a 64% difference (mean +/−1 SD) in tree and shrub cover. It is notable that this effect size is larger than that of student body SES (associated with a 2.4% difference in test performance over a +/−1 SD range of SES). In our sample population, having trees and shrubs around urban schools appears to be on par with the strength of the association of negative test performance with a lower-income student body. As these results are based on cross-sectional data, these inferences cannot be assumed to be causal and warrant further exploration.

In our sample, tree and shrub cover [not greenness (NDVI) or agricultural cover] farther from urban schools (750–1000 m and not closer) was associated with higher test performance. The significant interaction between tree and shrub cover and the urban context is in line with ART. While this theory emphasizes the demands on cognitive function from the taxing stimuli present in urban environments, little is known about how strong these stimuli need to be before replenishment will be realized through the restorative impacts of nature exposure. We used the United States Census definition of urban areas which included all areas with >2500 people (United States Census Bureau, 2010), suggesting that greenspace may provide restorative benefits even in relatively small population centers (and perhaps relatively low levels of the associated taxing stimuli existent in urban environments). It is important to note the low threshold for urbanicity here, and to consider that this definition of "urban" includes many locations with population densities that fall well below that of many cities and metropolitan areas. Even with this definition, however, an additional mechanism that may explain the association with education benefits and trees and shrubs in urban areas only could be that air pollution is worse in these urban areas (OECD, 2014), so greenspace reduction of air pollution and the associated effects may therefore be observed in urban but not rural schools. A study of schools in Barcelona implicates the potential importance of this mechanism within a city context (Dadvand et al., 2015).

Our exploratory findings inform one type of intervention that could be tested further for causality. The larger distance effects (750 and 1000 m) may be associated with (1) classroom views, (2) passive exposure to trees in the larger neighborhood area while commuting to school, (3) increased nature contact on school grounds or at home, if students live relatively close to school, or (4) improved air quality in the school vicinity as trees intercept particulate pollutants. The impacts of policy interventions that alter tree and shrub cover in the area encompassing school grounds (such as school gardens) and the larger neighborhood areas (such as urban planning decisions, and creation of urban green belts or neighborhood parks) should be explored through natural and controlled experiments in the future. Alternatively, the association with larger areas could be reflective of reaching some threshold in cumulative greenness over the larger distances, or of socioeconomic neighborhood conditions that were not perfectly captured by the socioeconomic variables used in this study.

As global education demand continues to grow and education budgets continue to lag [e.g., at least 30 United States' states provided less funding per student in the 2014 school year than they did before the 2008 recession (Leachman and Mai, 2014)], the possibility for urban greening to provide costeffective educational benefits deserves further attention. Given that educational benefits may accrue from tree and shrub cover at the larger neighborhood scale (per our findings of an association with tree and shrub cover at larger distances from schools), urban greening for educational benefits has the potential to provide additional benefits to the environment (e.g., endangered species habitat, movement corridors for wide ranging species) and to people [e.g., reducing the heat island effect of cities, reducing air pollution and associated respiratory and heart disease (McDonald et al., 2016)]. Causal experimental tests to probe the relationship between urban greenspace and student performance and its causal pathways are needed, and could include explorations of these additional benefits. Joint experimentation in this space by education, conservation, public health and urban design researchers is warranted.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

GB and JF acquired and cleaned the data and conducted analyses. JS designed and conducted the statistical analyses. HT drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to study concept and design, interpretation of findings, and edited and revised the manuscript.

## FUNDING

Funding was provided by the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Jan Slaats, Jim Platt, and Juan Sebastian Lozano for their GIS analyses, and Caroline Shin, Melissa Wibowo, Aunika Swenson, Angelique Dakkak, Charlene Chambliss-Rudiger, Sarah Kolarik, and Gerald Young for their test score data acquisition and cleaning. We also thank to Adrian Stier, Ole Shelton, Kristin Marshall, and Eric Buhle for their statistical advice. JS gratefully acknowledges T. Robbins for inspiration. GB gratefully acknowledges the Walker Faculty Fellowship, the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, and the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology.

### SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018. 02074/full#supplementary-material

#### REFERENCES

fpsyg-09-02074 October 25, 2018 Time: 15:3 # 8

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** 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.

Copyright © 2018 Tallis, Bratman, Samhouri and Fargione. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Independent Mobility and Social Affordances of Places for Urban Neighborhoods: A Youth-Friendly Perspective

#### Frederico Lopes1 \*, Rita Cordovil1,2 and Carlos Neto1

1 Laboratory of Motor Behavior, Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, 2 Centro Interdisciplinar de Performance Humana, Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Meaning of place is usually approached as slow social cognitive construction. However, grounded on the theory of affordances, it may also stem from direct perception-action processes, which enable the formation of immediate perceived functional, social or symbolic meaning of place (Raymond et al., 2017b). In the present study, affordances of places, which are perceived by a specific perceiver in a specific place, were mapped using a web-map survey. Each place offers opportunities for interaction, behavior, use, feeling or meaning, which is directly perceived and actualized there. This paper aims at identifying the degree of youth-friendliness of urban neighborhoods using the hypothetical intertwined model of independent mobility and actualized affordances (Kyttä, 2004) combined with place use and meaning (Broberg et al., 2013a). SoftGISchildren methodology (Broberg et al., 2013a) was adopted to carry out a cross-sectional research, involving 145 sixth to ninth graders of the Great Lisbon area. SoftGIS integrates Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS), enabling collection and place mapping of daily subjective environmental experiences in the physical environment, consequently allowing for individuals to be actively engaged in public processes of participation (Brown and Kyttä, 2014). A place based web survey called "Ideal City: a game of graphic imagination" was adopted. Participants were asked to map their home place, select and mark social, functional, leisure and emotional place transactions, and report actual and ideal mobility to these places. Findings on mobility showed that shorter distances to meaningful affordances of places promote active and independent travel; ideally, youths would like to be more frequently active and more frequently autonomous. As for meaningful places, a total of 1632 affordances were localized, with a higher number on social category. Neighborhood area (500 m around home place) was assessed as youth-friendly, where active and independent travel occurred more frequently, and social affordances were the most expressive type. Relational and affectional experience in the neighborhood places was meaningful for youth. Municipalities should consider these features when planning, designing and managing residential areas aiming for the well-being and health of young citizens; and include youths as specialists of space (spatialists) in planning participatory processes (PPGIS).

Keywords: neighborhood, independent mobility, active travel, social affordances of places, SoftGIS methodology, youth-friendly

#### Edited by:

Marketta Kyttä, Aalto University, Finland

#### Reviewed by:

Stephan Barthel, Gävle University College, Sweden Victor Corral-Verdugo, Universidad de Sonora, Mexico Lynne Catherine Manzo, University of Washington, United States

> \*Correspondence: Frederico Lopes<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 26 July 2017 Accepted: 23 October 2018 Published: 13 November 2018

#### Citation:

Lopes F, Cordovil R and Neto C (2018) Independent Mobility and Social Affordances of Places for Urban Neighborhoods: A Youth-Friendly Perspective. Front. Psychol. 9:2198. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02198

### INTRODUCTION

### Theoretical Mosaic

fpsyg-09-02198 November 10, 2018 Time: 13:42 # 2

According to the UNICEF report on the state of world children (United Nations for Children's Fund, 2012), childhood experience is becoming increasingly urban, since more than one billion children are living in cities and towns. Portugal is no exception, and statistics indicate that the largest population densities of children in Portugal (0–14 years old) is concentrated in urban municipalities, and in the Great Lisbon area this percentage is of 20.5% (Pordata Statistics Portugal, 2011). Independent mobility and person-place relationships are fundamental aspects of youth's daily lives in the urban environment and are key features that need to be addressed when conceptualizing and planning child and youth-friendly environments, settings, neighborhoods, and structures (Kyttä, 2004; Eisinger, 2012; Whitzman and Mizrachi, 2012; Broberg et al., 2013a; Carroll et al., 2015).

Independent mobility of children or youth in the urban setting can be defined as permission for children to move without adult supervision in their neighborhood and city (Hillman et al., 1990; Tranter, 1994) so that they can explore and learn about the environment at their own rhythm (Björklid and Nordstrom, 2004), toward a progressive and wider freedom of action and movement (Tonucci, 2005). Previous studies have shown Portugal with low levels of children's independent mobility (Cordovil et al., 2015) and ranked internationally in the 14th place among 16 countries (Bicket, 2013). Moreover, in urban centers, children and youths' restrictions on autonomous movement in Portugal are particularly augmented (Lopes et al., 2014). Children's independent mobility is fundamental for children and young people's health, well-being and overall development. Brown et al. (2008) summarize, from other relevant studies, such benefits: development of motor skills; increase in additional physical activity; influence on cognitive development by helping children to increase their wayfinding abilities, and also the development of emotional bonds between children and the natural environment. On the other hand, restrictions on children's freedom to roam in the environment have been synthesized by Alparone and Pacilli (2012) as hindering the development of motor, spatial, social, and analytical competences; decrease of physical activity and difficulties controlling weight; increase of environmental fears and feelings of loneliness; and weaker sense of community. Moreover, the exclusion of children and of youths from public space constitutes a threat for meaningful participation of young citizens in the matters of the city governance (Tonucci and Rissotto, 2001).

Human movement through the environment becomes more complex throughout development simultaneously that person-place interactions gain further complexity and multidimensionality. Hart and Moore (1973) explain that the child constructs knowledge about the environment through "acting-in-space." Weston (2010) points out that physical movement through the environment is necessary for learning about it and that young people are physically able to travel independently and are psychologically prone to it. In this sense, the purpose of human mobility is very much related with place experience and vice-versa. Therefore, mobility, namely, independent mobility, is crucial for young people to gain access to diversified socio-physical spaces, where these person-place interactions take place. In this way, on a daily basis, young people roam through different socio-physical environmental settings, where life in places occurs within a complex range of internal and external features, processes, and activities. In this research, the youth-place relationship is addressed through the transactional approach within the field of Environmental Psychology. This theoretical perspective of person–environment phenomena considers them as holistic entities composed of an intrinsic and inter-related assemblage generated through the interplay of people in action, psychological processes, physical environment, and temporal qualities (Altman and Rogoff, 1987; Bonnes and Secchiaroli, 1995; Werner et al., 2002).

According to Gibson (1979/1986) and Heft (2012), an affordance is a psychological relational significant property perceived by the individual when interacting with the sociophysical environment. Thus, it means that when an individual perceives an affordance in a given space through an immediate sensory-action process, a significant feature or cue in the physical landscape specifies a possibility of action according to the individual's developmental characteristics and the specific feature within such space. Kyttä (2003, 2004) stresses that the environment offers the individual an infinite number of affordances which act as a potential for human multidimensional activity. It is within this range of environmental potential that intentional perception-action cycles take place. For this to happen a matching between the individual's corporality, expressed by his physical, social and psychological characteristics, skills and necessities, and the material and sociocultural features of the environment has to occur. This process is designated by the author as "actualization." In this sense, a perceived affordance implies signaling an opportunity in the environment for a transactional experience by a specific actor, while an actualized affordance refers to detecting and establishing a mutual embodied fit with such environmental opportunity or cue. Sociocultural processes and psychological processes are mutually constitutive through on-going co-emergent human-environment transactions, which means that affordances are nested within the sociocultural tissue and vice-versa as a dynamical system (Heft, 2013). By applying the theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979/1986) in embodied cognition, Raymond et al. (2017a) refer to embodied ecosystems as relational, situational, and dynamical features between humans and the ecosystem. These are self-perpetuated and iteratively reconfigured over time as a consequence of perception-action processes that are actualized through coconstitutive relations between environment, culture, body and mind. These authors also stress that meanings and values of embodied ecosystems extend beyond instrumental functionality to a multiple and diverse array of psychological layers such as symbolic, social, cultural, spatial, etc. Likewise, several authors understand the concept of affordance as multidimensional, which manifests itself through social, emotional, cognitive and cultural properties that children and young people attribute to places, providing them with psychological relevant meaning

(Graumann, 2002; Christensen, 2003; Chatterjee, 2005; Min and Lee, 2006; Lim and Barton, 2010).

A more in depth approach to place experience is necessary to understand the complexity of immediate person-place perceptual processes of interaction. Drawing on the work of several scholars, Masterson et al. (2017) have reflected on the influence of sense of place to the research on socio-ecological systems. Such studies refer to sense of place as people's attachment and meaning to settings in the environment, where the former is an emotional, evaluative type of bond composed by place dependence and place identity; and the latter refers to imagistic descriptive, symbolic and interpretative descriptions of what places are like for individuals. We concur with Raymond et al. (2010) on the idea that the attributes of the socio-physical settings for a specific perceiver and user are intertwined with specific personalized emotions, which are grounded in the personal context of place attachment. Concerning "place meaning," or how do people create meanings to a place, according to Stedman (2008), settings have the potential for users to create multiple embodied cognitive meanings, referring to the descriptive symbolic meaning that people attribute to a place (Stedman, 2016).

Therefore, in sense of place research it is popular to refer to place attachment and place meaning as slow social constructive processes. Nevertheless, place may also be addressed as a direct perception-action process, grounded on the theory of affordances, which enables the formation of an immediate perceived meaning of place (Raymond et al., 2017b). Meaning of place is perceived directly, in real time, through a mutuality fit between the attributes of the environmental features and those of the perceiver. This perspective is grounded in the transactional perspective of environmental psychology where the person and setting are inseparable, acting as a socio-cultural cognitive embodied ecosystem, where dynamic, multilevel transactions co-emerge within the body, mind, culture and environment (Raymond et al., 2017a). It also means that all the information and meaning necessary for the affordance to be actualized by the perceiver is available in the specific setting to be perceived. In addition, places have intertwined multiple meanings, sensory, inherent, instrumental, socio-cultural and identity-expressive types. Through direct perception and action functional, social or symbolic place meanings are immediately perceived and actualized in the presence of environmental cues and perceptual components that exist in a specific setting. This is opposite to a slower process of creating meaning of places through social construction (Raymond et al., 2017b).

In the present study, the youth in place immediate experience and place meaning is theoretically hinged on actualized affordances of places. These are relational, situational and dynamical properties that temporally co-emerge within an entanglement of relations between the mind, body, culture and the environment, nested in embodied socio-cultural ecosystems (Raymond et al., 2017a). Also, our study is methodologically grounded on a place-based approach designated as SoftGIS, which is grounded on the person–environment transactional approach to place interactions.

SoftGIS integrates a wider spectrum of methods and processes addressed as Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS). Brown and Reed (2009) refer to PPGIS as the process of using GIS technologies to produce local knowledge toward inclusion and empowerment of marginalized groups. According to Sieber (2006), PPGIS consist of methods that use GIS to foster participatory democracy by widening the spectrum of public involvement in policymaking and contribute for capacity building and social change undertaken by nongovernmental organizations, grassroots groups, and communitybased organizations.

In SoftGIS methodology, people's local knowledge of the environment is personal, place-based, action-driven and spatially referenced (Rantanen and Kahila, 2009), stemming from transactional interactions between person–environment. According to Brown and Kyttä (2014), PPGIS methods, which SoftGISchildren integrate, expresses a participatory mapping process that depends on participants' capacity to recall their experiences in the physical environment, leading to an attribution of meaning and value for specific places. Therefore, SoftGISchildren methodology is theoretically delimited by the transactional approach of people-environment relationships, which is supported by Gibson (1979/1986) concept of affordance.

The seminal work of Kyttä et al. (2012) that focused on mapping children's meaningful place, and revealing their mobility behaviors and perceived health was groundbreaking. In our view, this study was in fact forthcoming because it revealed that SoftGIS place-based methodology could be used by children and youth to characterize place interaction and childfriendliness of the environment. In our study, we refer to youth's meaningful places as actualized affordances of places that are categorized according to different types of place transactions. More specifically, by using a computer interface associated with a digital map, participants locate multi-place specific transactions (actions, activities, social behaviors, feelings, and meanings), which take place in the urban environment. This enables each participant to map his or her own specific affordances that are directly perceived and actualized in the different places. These types of interactions were previously determined and grouped by the researchers as social, functional, leisure and emotional categories, similarly to what Kyttä and colleagues did when operationalizing categories of place interaction in the SoftGISchildren study.

SoftGISchildren methodology, which was designed for research with children and youth about environment quality (Kyttä et al., 2012; Broberg et al., 2013b), is underpinned by environmental child friendliness. This criteria is proposed by Moore (1986) as diversity of environmental resources and access to play and exploration. It was later revised by Kyttä (2003) where an hypothetical model composed by degree of independent mobility and number of actualized affordances defines child-friendliness of a place. In our view, there are more features that strongly contribute for this methodology to be child-centered and child-friendly. The content of the survey, its digital support, its user-friendly characteristics are included in these. Moreover, the communalities between its theoretical nature and the perspective of Sociology of Childhood of the children as active and competent social actors, knowledgeable of their spatial, social and cultural realities (Corsaro, 2011) are not

to be dismissed. Other research conducted with SoftGISchildren have proved the online interactive mapping methodology to be very effective in the study of child-place relationships (Broberg et al., 2013b; Bhosale et al., 2015; Stewart et al., 2015).

In this article we underline the neighborhood area as a meaningful environmental setting where youth-place transactions take place. According to Bronfenbrenner (1994), the neighborhood is an important microsystem where children and youth's social interactivity with multi-dimensional features (physical, social, and symbolic) enable or unable progressively complex interaction or activity in the immediate environment. Clark and Uzzell (2002) measured social affordances actualized by adolescents in several settings, and concluded that the neighborhood, school and town center are promoters of both social and retreat behaviors. More recently, Villanueva and colleagues reinforce the need to explore the effect of the neighborhood built environment on child development as fundamental for an urban planning that promotes a healthy development (Villanueva et al., 2016). Additionally, in New Zealand an ongoing research project, using SoftGIS methodology, is addressing the study of the associations between neighborhood built environments and children's independent mobility, active travel, physical activity and place interactions (Oliver et al., 2016). Therefore, the neighborhood is a pivotal setting to study children's and youth's independent mobility (Stewart et al., 2015; Tranter, 2015), which is a crucial aspect to promote health and healthy lifestyles. For the present study, neighborhood area was defined as a 500 m buffer around each participant's home. On this, Vanloon (2011) points out that the most popular approach to define a child's neighborhood is to define a circular buffer around home or school with size and shape informed by theory and/or empirical data. Similar studies, adopting the same methodology, used a 500 m residential buffer (Kyttä et al., 2012; Broberg and Sarjala, 2015).

Neighborhoods are conceived as embodied socio-cultural ecosystems which are relational, situational and dynamical, the same way affordances are (Raymond et al., 2017a). The neighborhood is composed by a diversified range of behavioralsettings that are characterized by a dynamical interdependence between subject and a specific socio, cultural and physical setting (Barker, 1968; Wicker, 2002). Children's meaningful places result through children's social participation, mediated by shared intersubjective collective actions, supported by affordances, in specific location, over a period of time (Heft, 2018). Thus, neighborhood places for children and youth are embodied ecosystems that are nested in specific affordances, which are in hand nested to specific places.

To assess youth-friendliness degree of the urban neighborhoods, we draw on two previous interrelated research works. Herein, Kyttä (2004) conducted a cross cultural study about assessing the child-friendliness of Finnish and Byelorussian urban neighborhoods, developing an hypothetical model comprised by the analysis of children's independent mobility and number of actualized affordances, which results in four possible types of settings. The Bullerby type is constituted by opportunities for independent mobility and diversity of actualized affordances, where children and young people