Hi! Thanks so much for your question and comment.  Dilafruz is currently returning from a conference in Austria where she delivered a keynote address, so she will have to provide a fuller response when she returns.  I'm a co-investigator, and my rationale for focusing on 8-8 is that many of the performance expectations from the NGSS at the middle school level can be taught very well through gardening activities.  For example, the information on a seed packet reflects the inherited traits of the plant, while what happens in the garden is due to both genetics and environment; so the gardening helps students see how these two influences play out in the life of an organism. As far as I know there is no current plan for working with elementary students.  The immediate plan is to share the curriculum and research results more widely. Many of the hands-on activities are typical gardening activities, such as composting and designing cold frames; but with clear rationale and related science concepts.  -- Cary Sneider

Hi-- Ellen here, one of the motivational researchers. We also selected middle school because that is a developmental period during which engagement normatively starts dropping. So we were hopeful that garden-based educational activities, if they were well-integrated with the NGSS, could support both motivation and learning. Perhaps surprisingly, there are many more garden-based curricula for grades K-5th. So this work was designed to help fill in that gap.

We are very pleased that you are interested in the research results.  My work has been on the science curriculum side, our researchers can provide a further response on the research side of the effort. -- Cary Sneider

Thanks for your interest! Yes, we are excited about the research results as well, but I should point out that these findings just show that engagement in the garden-based learning activities is linked to current and future science outcomes. These findings are consistent with a causal interpretation, of course, but are suggestive rather than definitive.

I get that. But it is nice to see that there is this relationship and that is seems to have an impact.

Hi, Brian,

Hi, Brian, I quite agree that gardening is an integrative subject. Although focus is clearly on life sciences, students study the physical characteristics of their compost bins, measuring the changing temperature, and inferring chemical processes that must be taking place as a result of decomposition within the compost. Other lessons include the water cycle—a concept that spans the physical sciences and Earth and space sciences—and engineering as students design, build, and reengineer a cold frame. The unit also has a very strong social studies component concerning food traditions in different cultures, including the cultural traditions that the students share with their classmates. I believe that the integrative nature of the activities contribute to the students' growing sense of self-efficacy and motivation for learning science that we see in the research results.

Thank you, Walter!

You have made such an important point! Closing the research to practice loop is so important, but a step that often gets lost. We're working closely with our school partners to help mitigate that common problem, but your post is a good reminder to  convey our findings in the most accessible ways.

I will let Ellen Skinner and/or Heather Brule, our key researchers on the project, respond in more depth, but in our SciLG project, the key research findings indicate that all four science outcomes (science grades, science learning, science classroom engagement, and science identity) appear to be positively impacted by engagement in the learning gardens! (All outcomes were statistically significant.) Also, by following a cohort of students for three years of middle school, we're also seeing that engagement in the gardens seems to have a mitigating effect on typical motivational  declines that take place over the summer months (and in adolescence more generally).

We are excited to continue analyzing the third year of data (collection underway right now) to see the longitudinal impacts of this type of learning experience. As the  curriculum & instruction and professional  development specialist on the project, I'm most excited by these findings in regards to school learning gardens more broadly. For a variety of reasons (beyond the scope of this posting :-) outdoor learning experiences and field trips are harder to implement. School gardens are literally just outside the doors, making authentic, experiential science/STEM learning accessible to all!

Thanks again for your comments! I jumped from the findings to the implications, but that's what makes me so excited by this work!  :-)

Warm regards,

Sybil

Thanks for the question, Steven. We really liked the underlying assumptions of SDT-- how it is based on the assumption that all students have deep reserves of intrinsic motivation, and the job of educators to create learning activities that ignite and channel that motivation toward deep learning. Too often students from ethnic minority and low income backgrounds are labeled as "unmotivated," which presents us from thinking carefully about the nature of the academic work that we ask students to undertake. We found SDT very compatible with notions of culturally responsive pedagogy, which can provide guidance about creating learning environments (like SciLG) that promote intrinsic motivation for all students.

Hello Steven, I am thrilled with your question about "how far are we in understanding the potential of garden-based learning especially as a contribution to the NGSS vision for STEM education?"

Let me first respond to the first part of your question related to the potential of garden-based learning. In a synthesis of research from 1990 to 2010 that addressed academic outcomes of garden-based learning, my co-author Scott Dixon and I found that Science as a subject tended to have the most positive outcome followed by Language Arts and Mathematics for the 48 studies that qualified for the synthesis. The synthesis entitled: "Impact of Garden-Based Learning on Academic Outcomes in Schools: Synthesis of Research Between 1990 and 2010," is published in the Review of Educational Research. The online version is available here: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/83/2/211. We also discovered that generally speaking the quality of research needed attention. Furthermore, most of the studies clustered around grades 3-5. So our NSF-funded SciLG project serves a real need to examine the impact of school gardens at the middle level when Science curriculum is designed using NGSS and gardens serve as the milieu for learning.

With the proliferation of school gardens in the United States across school districts -- urban and rural, large and small -- and also across continents, there is a need expressed by teachers and administrators for curriculum integration and for research. The second part of your question, thus, is critical for researchers to address. We believe that we must study the academic linkages of school gardens. In many districts, teachers and university faculty are collaborating to design NGSS-integrated curriculum that uses the garden on school grounds for relevant science instruction. As more resources become available, research needs to be a critical part of the enterprise in order to legitimize this work. This is what motivates our SciLG team.

Thank you for your interest in our project. Please let us  know if you have further thoughts on this.

So very interesting, Jodye. I love hearing these origin stories. Our gardens started when Dilafruz and her then colleague Pramod Parajuli took a look at the underutilized Parks and Recreation site across from one of our schools. I will let my colleagues fill you in on the details, but the short answer is "yes-- middle school students definitely worry about getting dirty and (based on our Portland weather) wet in the gardens. We realized that for many of our students, who are low income, they worked hard to get their specific shoes and things, and so did not want to get them dirty or wet. There have also been critiques of garden programs from the perspective of Latino parents, who sometimes see education as pathways OUT of farm labor, but as far as I know, we have not had pushback from parents. In fact, for years we have had family and community gardens on the site, so that in general the more parents know about gardening, the more support they provide for SciLG.

Hello Jodye,

Thank you for sharing your observations. I was touched by your example of personal involvement in creating gardens at your the school in California. Your story reminds me of what David Orr states eloquently: Landscapes shape Mindscapes. For those of us who are gardeners it is clear that the experience of exposure mostly to asphalt indeed differs drastically from the experience of interaction with life in the gardens. In my co-authored book, "Learning Gardens and Sustainability Education: Bringing Life to Schools and Schools to Life" living soil is used as a metaphor for the kind of education we need to promote especially when children's senses are being numbed due to disconnectedness from real life. 

You also asked about how kids view getting "dirty." I wish I could share with you a series of photographs. I have been visiting school gardens across the country (and abroad) as part of my new book project on Case Studies of School Gardens. A class of kindergartners in one school in the mid-west seemed excited as they were coming out of the school building to the gardens. When their garden teacher asked them to go and check if the compost was ready for them to bring to the garden beds for planting, three boys took some trowels and ran to the compost pile. Next, they jumped into it. While trying to pick some compost out, they paused and sat down in the compost pile (it was actually rich soil and ready) and started to explore the critters they found. They did not care one bit about whether their shoes or their hair or their clothes were messed up. In fact, they were so totally absorbed...curious, excited, wondering...the teacher had to remind them to please bring the soil to the raised beds. Squealing with delight, they ran back and forth, compost feeding the garden bed in anticipation of seeds those tiny hands would next plant!

Three years ago, my colleague and I conducted focus groups/interviews of sixth graders in the garden program in Portland. We explored many questions with them along with what they liked and/or disliked about garden learning. They talked about a lot of things that they liked; however, the only thing they mentioned (if at all) about what they disliked, was that sometimes when it rained and it was cold they preferred not to be out in the garden. Those of us who live in Portland Oregon, have given up trying to polish our shoes or even keep them dry ... it rains a lot here. We do provide boots and rain gear in the gardens for those who want to wear them. We appreciate you noticing that our gardens are lush. Yes, we do take the greenery for granted here in Portland. 

We would love to hear more about your experiences later, as this showcase ends on Monday. Email: williamsdi@pdx.edu

Again, we thank you for sharing your passion and interests.