Gardening Activities at School and Their Impact on Children’s Knowledge and Attitudes to the Consumption of Garden Vegetables

Abstract

Learning through gardening is known to be an educational strategy in which a garden is used as a teaching tool. Systemic reviews of the impact of school gardening on academic performance and dietary habits foreground the need for additional quantitative studies that would use strong experimental designs. The aim of the present research was to establish the impact of school gardening on children’s knowledge of and attitude to the consumption of garden vegetables. A quasi-experiment was conducted including one control and one experimental group, with each group consisting of 15 children aged 6–7 years. The children’s prior knowledge and attitude toward the consumption of garden vegetables was identified through individual interviews. Participants in the experimental group then carried out their activities in a school garden that was built in co-operation with an organic farm located in close vicinity of the school. Following these activities, interviews were repeated in both groups to establish any newly acquired knowledge of and changes in the children’s attitude to garden vegetables. The results revealed that the children in both groups had poor general knowledge about garden vegetables at the beginning of the experiment. After their work in the garden was concluded, the knowledge of garden vegetables in the experimental group of children improved to a statistically significant degree. The children’s attitude to consuming garden vegetables also became more positive than before they engaged in the gardening activities. The results of this research indicated that school gardening activities improved academic outcomes and the children’s attitude to the consumption of vegetables. Therefore, the research suggests that gardening should be considered a vital part of school education. Keywords: active learning, garden-based learning, organic gardening, outdoor education, school garden.

Effectiveness of Gardening-Only, Cooking-Only and Combined Cooking and Gardening Programs in Elementary Schools to Improve Fruit and Vegetable Intake: A Systematic Review

“…The third study also found a significant result regarding dietary self-efficacy to consume vegetables (p < 0.001) [46]. The fourth and final study found no significant attitude difference between groups regarding consumption of vegetables but significant attitudes towards consumption of rocket, leek, and swede (p = 0.003, 0.010, and 0.006 respectively) in the intervention group [41].…”

“…The details of each intervention and article are included in Table 1. Nine of these studies included gardening-only interventions [13,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24]50], eight studies included cooking-only interventions [8,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25], and nineteen studies included combined cooking/gardening interventions [15,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Out of the nine gardening-only intervention studies (8/9-89% had positive results), seven studies had significant findings for at least one relevant outcome, one study reported positive qualitative findings, and one study did not have any significant results [24].…”

“…The fourth study that assessed this variable reported on gardening knowledge as well; the results were also significant (p < 0.001) [46]. The fifth article looked at the gardening knowledge in both the intervention (p < 0.0001) and the control groups (p = 0.0003) [41]. The sixth article reported significant increase for the treatment group in improvement of knowledge of vegetables in season (p = 0.04) [48].…”

“…Out of these 18 interventions, all the studies (100%) produced at least one significant finding [14,15,21,25,27,[30][31][32]35,36,38,40,42,43,46,[48][49][50]. For the next category, there were a total of 15 studies that had a duration from 7 to 12 months [13,19,20,[22][23][24]26,28,29,33,37,41,44,45,47]. Out of these 15 studies, 10 (66%) produced at least one significant finding [13,19,22,23,25,26,41,44,45,47].…”

The order of garden-based learning from science education to STEM education

“…Wells (2015) reported that the knowledge of gardenbased students about science increased compared to the control group. Kos and Jerman (2019) showed that school gardening activities improve academic outcomes and children's attitudes towards vegetable consumption. Skinner et al (2018) stated that when they observed the garden-based activities of secondary school students, there was an increase in their success in learning science in the garden and in other basic subjects (mathematics and social studies) taught in the garden, and their participation in science lessons increased.…”