ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1585593
This article is part of the Research TopicRural STEMM Education Research: Bridging between Uniqueness and UniversalityView all 11 articles
Testing Rural Early Educators Attitudes towards Children’s Outdoor Recreation in Nature and Science (TREE-ACORNS): A new framework for exploring early educators’ situated science teaching.
Provisionally accepted
- College of Education and Allied Professions, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
In this study, we report results from development of a new measurement model for early educators' dispositions for supporting science learning in outdoor environments, the TREE-ACORNS (Testing Rural Early Educators Attitudes towards Children's Outdoor Recreation in Nature and Science). With a sample of 108 participants, 66% of whom identified as rural-residing, connections among the new TREE-ACORN constructs were preliminarily evaluated in structural equation model (SEM) framework. Results offer preliminary support that teacher's expectations and values around children's outdoor recreation relate to their science costs and indirectly relate to science beliefs, practices, and outdoor learning. Outdoor recreation and experiences are thus a potential lever for promoting early science learning. Further, science costs and retrospective outdoor activities differed for teachers from rural locations, suggesting they perceived a lower cost to doing science activities with their students, and spend more time outside, a potential strength of rural early educators.
Keywords: early childhood education, situated expectancy-value theory, rural, outdoor learning, science teacher attitudes
Received: 28 Feb 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pedonti, Becker, Watson and Grist. 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) or licensor 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.
* Correspondence: Sarah Pedonti, College of Education and Allied Professions, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, 28723, North Carolina, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.