Children’s outdoor play at early learning and child care centres: examining the impact of environmental play features on children’s play behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Early learning and child care centres are critical settings to support children’s regular, repeated and quality time spent in outdoor play. Gibson’s theory of affordances highlights the importance of the human-environment relationship, emphasizing how children use environmental information to inform their behaviour. This study aims to understand the association between children’s outdoor play behaviour and common environmental play features in early learning and child care outdoor play spaces, through the behaviour patterns of children. Children’s play behaviour was collected via observational behaviour mapping at eight early learning and child care centres in the Greater Vancouver region between September 2021 and November 2022, as part of the PROmoting Early Childhood Outside study. A multivariate logistic regression model examined the association between outdoor play behaviour and environmental play features, via odds ratio and 95% confidence intervals. The results indicate environmental play features, including gardening areas, playhouses, climbing structures and tricycle paths supported increased opportunities for children’s outdoor play. Gardening areas, playhouses, sandboxes, outdoor stages and fixed water features provided opportunities for exploratory play, while climbing structures and trike paths provided opportunities for physical play. Opportunities for diverse forms of play were less realized in dedicated open play areas, with the availability of loose parts and moveable equipment primarily influencing these spaces. The results of this study have important implications for future early learning and child care outdoor space design. Further research should consider children’s dynamic movement and transition between outdoor affordances, and the influence of loose parts on the use of environmental play features.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".