Nature as a Resource for Learning

12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
LES Building R-350
Join via Zoom streaming here.

Cathy Jordan, IonE’s new Associate Director for Leadership and Education, will describe her efforts to advance rigorous research to understand the mechanisms of action underlying nature’s impact on children’s learning and development.

The intuition that “nature is good for children” is widespread, and yet historically, the evidence for this intuition has been uncompelling, with a distressing number of weak studies and inflated claims. In this seminar, Cathy will discuss the “Science of Nature-based Learning Collaborative Research Network” (NBL Network). Cathy serves as principle investigator for the NBL Network, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. The NBL Network is comprised of researchers from diverse disciplines as well as a smaller number of practitioners from various sectors. Cathy will discuss an integrative literature review on nature contact’s impact on children’s learning and development as well as the creation of a research agenda to advance nature-based learning evidence that emerged out of the SoNBL Network. Cathy will make the case that the evidence for nature’s impact, and the mechanisms of action, are more robust than we might have thought.