Forest preschool attendance is associated with improvements in creative thinking in preschool children, with only forest-school groups improving on all creative dimensions¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · reviewr3·q2
Currency · newest study 2023 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q2 i? Children attending forest preschools showed significant posttest improvements in fluency, originality, and imagination, while indoor preschool children did not. → Enrico Sella · Monica Bolognesi · Emma Bergamini · Lucia Mason · Francesca Pazzaglia 2023
Evidence¶
Enrico Sella · Monica Bolognesi · Emma Bergamini · Lucia Mason · Francesca Pazzaglia 2023¶
Enrico Sella · Monica Bolognesi · Emma Bergamini · Lucia Mason · Francesca Pazzaglia. (2023). Psychological Benefits of Attending Forest School for Preschool Children: a Systematic Review. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09750-4
q2 · i? · review · r3
Narrative synthesis of two quasi-experimental pre-post studies (Wojciehowski & Ernst, 2018; Ernst & Burcak, 2019) using the TCAM task, as reported in the review's Creativity section. The review reports that "only the former reported significant improvements in all three creative dimensions" at posttest.
"At the posttest, participants in forest preschools demonstrated significantly higher scores compared to the pretest for all the creative dimensions assessed (fluency, originality, and imagination; p < 0.001 for all dimensions), while those in indoor preschools did not."
Discussion¶
Learner Variables¶
- Creativity — outcome: instruction changes it
Related Claims¶
- Evidence on cognitive function benefits of forest preschool is mixed: teacher-rated global cognition improved, but executive functions and working memory showed no significant differences — related
- The methodological quality of forest-school studies is poor: most are at high or moderate risk of bias, with no follow-ups and inadequate statistical procedures — related
- Forest-school benefits are measured with heterogeneous methods, mostly questionnaires and tasks administered to children, with only two studies using objective measures — related
- CREATE does not produce a significant immediate interaction effect on flexibility, though the experimental group improved pre-to-post — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
forest-school-improves-preschool-creativity |
title |
Forest preschool attendance is associated with improvements in creative thinking in preschool children, with only forest-school groups improving on all creative dimensions |
description |
Forest preschool attendance is associated with improvements in creative thinking in preschool children, with only forest-school groups improving on all creative dimensions |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2023 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-21 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — enrico-sella-monica-bolognesi-emma-bergamini-lucia-mason-francesca-pazzaglia-2023 |
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