Green space and academic success

Abstract

The Dutch system of education has been praised for its high quality for years, and Dutch students are one of the highest educated in the world. However, it has been reported that Dutch school performances have been declining since 2006, and this decline in performance is worrying since school performance is a critical predicter of long-term success and well-being. The declining performances make it relevant to explore strategies that can potentially enhance academic outcomes, and green space has been associated with academic performance through a variety of different ways and could serve as a potential solution to the declining school performances. A body of research is already conducted on the association between green space and school performance, but a research gap still exists on this association for the Dutch case. This study tried to address this research gap by conducting a literature review and executing regression analyses to investigate to what extend school performances are associated with green space exposure in the surroundings of primary schools in the Netherlands. Data was used on the average CITO-test score per neighborhood and the percentage of land use per neighborhood, along with covariates of the average socio-economic status score, average household size, and average level of urbanicity per neighborhood in the Netherlands to perform OLS and GWR analyses. Multivariate regression models revealed significant associations between academic performance and percentage of green space per neighborhood in the Netherlands. The OLS regression analysis indicates a significant association between the average CITO-test score and the percentage of green space per neighborhood in the Netherlands. The GWR analysis shows localized dynamics and indicates a statistically significant and positive association between the percentage of green space, and the average CITO-test score per neighborhood in the Netherlands in neighborhoods in the central southern part of the country in line with previous studies. The outcomes of the analyses of this study have been sufficient to answer this study’s research question, and the findings of this study can provide valuable insights for educational policymakers, school administrators, and urban planners seeking to create conducive learning environments to improve the declining school performances in the Netherlands.