Early Childhood Educator Participation in State-wide Outdoor Education Professional Development
Loading...
Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Early Childhood Education Journal
Abstract
Outdoor time has been shown to benefit different domains of young children’s development, including health, social-emotional learning, and cognitive outcomes. Early care and education (ECE) providers play a prominent role in the quality of outdoor experiences children receive while in their care. Yet, few studies have examined ECE programs’ participation in outdoor education professional development (PD)—specifically, which programs elect to participate in this type of PD. This study examined (i) the characteristics of ECE programs that applied to participate in the state-wide outdoor education PD in Delaware, United States, and (ii) which program characteristics predicted ECE programs’ participation in outdoor education PD. Administrative data on N = 828 programs’ characteristics and internal records on the application for the state-wide outdoor education PD collected over five PD cohorts for n = 170 programs were analyzed using logistic regression. The results showed that ECE programs that were located in less disadvantaged areas, previously participated in other state-offered PD, received program funding, and accepted child care subsidy were more likely to participate in the outdoor education PD. Findings of the study inform agencies’ and PD coordinators’ efforts to extend recruitment outreach to particular groups of ECE programs.
Description
This article was originally published in Early Childhood Education Journal. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02158-z
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Citation
"Novikova, E., Kelly, K., DeWese, J., & Lessard, L. (2026). Early Childhood Educator Participation in State-wide Outdoor Education Professional Development. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02158-z "
Collections
Endorsement
Review
Supplemented By
Referenced By
Creative Commons license
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as Attribution 4.0 United States