In any existing data bases we could not find any precise records of outdoor education, so we decided to gain information about winter outdoor education of elementary schools in Podravska region.
We included all of the 78 elementary schools from Podravska region in our research and analyze 53 schools (67,9%), which had information about their winter outdoor education presented on their web sites. We searched for information about participated grades, sport and other activities, duration, places they went and stayed. We also checked if web presentation included pictures, useful information for parents, author and date of publication. We completed our search for information about school size via e-mails or phone calls to schools. Web presentations were evaluated on three level quality scale (not appropriate, good and excellent).
We used Microsoft Excel 2016 for analysis and creating graphs. And IBM Statistics 22 for statistical analysis verifying hypothesis with Chi-Square test.
We found out that winter outdoor education is evenly distributed between 5th , 6th and 7th grades. We also found out that quality of presentation is not correlated with school size and that alpine skiing is leading sport activity in winter outdoor educations. Most winter outdoor education lasts five days and that is also what field guidelines suggests. In most cases schools offer alpine skiing. The majority of schools web presentations were evaluated by score “good presentation”. We also found out that the quality of web presentation was not correlated with school’s size.
Research is based on one region in Republic of Slovenia, but offers a model for containing information and opportunity for further research on this specific field. For that we suggest that based on that model, we analyze all regions in Slovenia and compare results, because of different conditions between regions and encourage schools to present their activities to public in more informative and interesting way.
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