Effects of indoor and outdoor play on children’s gross motor development: Implications for early childhood instructional design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In spite of the growing evidence of the benefits of both indoor and outdoor play, studies on the effects of these play environments on gross motor skill development remain largely underexplored. Also, children spend more time on sedentary activities as against physical play which affects their childhood development. Thus, this study examined the impact of indoor and outdoor play sessions on children’s gross motor skills, with a focus on physical strength, coordination, balance, stability, spatial awareness, body control, timing, and rhythm and its implications on early childhood instructional design. A pre-/post-test quasi-experimental design was used involving 32 children aged 3-5 years, randomly assigned into indoor play group (experimental group A) and outdoor play group (experimental group B). Data were collected using a performance-based assessment tool validated by early childhood education experts, and analyzed using mean, standard deviation, and analysis of covariance. The results revealed significant improvements in children’s gross motor skills with a medium effect size, with outdoor play sessions showing greater gains in physical strength, coordination, balance, stability, and timing compared to indoor play. These findings provide insights into the benefits of outdoor play in enhancing motor development. The findings of this study have implications for policy makers and early childhood instructional designers on the need to incorporate play into children’s educational experiences to enhance gross motor development in order to boost emotional, cognitive, and social develooment of children for enhanced physical growth academic performance. Consequently, the study recommends that instructional designers should prioritize outdoor play activities within early childhood education programs to foster gross motor development, emphasizing the importance of movement, exploration, and physical engagement in open play environments for optimal developmental outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".