Investigating Nature-based Preschoolers Gains in Early Literacy and Select Executive Function Skills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nature-based education has grown exponentially throughout the United States. However, it has yet to be determined to what extent these programs are preparing children for formal schooling in kindergarten and beyond. This study directly assessed school readiness (i.e., early literacy and executive function) skills of children who attended a nature-based preschool (n = 82; M age = 47.75 months) in comparison to children in a non-nature preschool setting (n = 58; M age = 50.16 months) in the fall and spring of one school year. Nature-based classrooms were shown to spend, on average, two hours more outside than the non-nature classrooms. Children at both locations developed skills in early literacy and some aspects of executive function (e.g., working memory and inhibitory control) at similar rates. Other aspects of executive function, such as behavioral self-regulation, were associated with greater growth for children attending non-nature classrooms. This study suggests high-quality nature-based preschools can be successful at promoting many areas of children’s school readiness but may need to be more intentional when supporting the development of some aspects of executive function.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".