A note on scale: this piece begins with one fork on one hillside trail, and with a habit we have kept in our route design for years. One meta-analysis appears later; we found it only after we had been doing this for some time.
A group of five- and six-year-olds reaches a fork on a hillside trail outside Taipei.
To the left, the familiar paved path: wide, and you can see the people ahead of you. To the right, a narrow track, the ground covered in dead leaves and fallen branches, where you have to find your own footing.
Nobody chooses for them.
One child pauses. One takes a friend’s hand. One tests a single step first, then walks in.
It is a very small decision in a day. But in outdoor education, we care a great deal about decisions this small.
The things a child really gets to decide are fewer than you would think
A child’s day is largely arranged for them: what time to get up, where to go, which class, which page, when to eat, when to be quiet. Most of these arrangements are necessary, and most of them are kind.
But if you lay a whole day out and count, the things a child actually judges for themselves — and then feels the result of straight away — are fewer than you would think.
Once you walk outdoors, there are suddenly a lot more of them.
What choice changes may not be how much a child learns
In 2008, Patall, Cooper and Robinson pooled 41 studies of choice in a single meta-analysis, published in Psychological Bulletin. When people were given a choice, intrinsic motivation generally rose; one of the strongest effects in the analysis was on a person’s sense of being able to handle the task.
What is interesting is what the analysis did not show. It did not show that giving children choices necessarily makes them learn better: there was no significant effect on subsequent learning.
In other words, what the analysis points to is not better learning outcomes, but differences in motivation and in how capable people felt while doing the task.
In practice, that can look like a shift from “someone told me to” towards “this is what I decided to do”.
And unimportant choices work too
More interesting still: the choices that worked better in that analysis were not necessarily the big, meaningful ones. Choices unrelated to the core content of a task had, on average, a larger effect than choices about the learning content itself. One possible explanation the authors offer is that the latter carry too high a cognitive cost.
That is close to what we see in the field.
A child does not need to decide whether the group climbs this hill today, and does not need to be responsible for the whole route. What a child can decide is:
- which side I walk on
- whether I stop for a moment first
- which stone I step on
- whether I walk on my own or take a friend’s hand first
- whether I rest now, or go a little further
These decisions are all small. But they are real: once a child has chosen, the next few steps really are different.
For a choice to do its work, it doesn’t have to be important. It has to be real.
The most valuable thing outdoors is not only nature. It keeps asking you to judge.
In a classroom, many things can be explained in advance. Outdoors is different.
The ground is not quite level. The weather changes. There may be two paths ahead. Whether this stone is steady underfoot, you have to feel for yourself. How tired you are now, and whether to stop, only your own body knows.
So we take children outside not only because the hills are beautiful, and not only because children need exercise.
The outdoors keeps putting small judgements back in the child’s hands.
And judgement is not something you get from knowing the principle. It needs a real situation, a choice made, and then whatever that choice brings next.
Children don’t learn judgement by learning about choice. They learn it by making real choices, one after another, and living with what follows. This is what we mean by use precedes mastery, in its most concrete form: a fork on a hillside trail.
Autonomy is not throwing a child out to cope alone
This needs saying clearly, because the two are often read as the same thing.
For young children, these judgements should not be big ones. Adults remain responsible for the route, for safety, for the timing, and for the range of what can be chosen. That narrow track could be an option only because it had been walked and assessed beforehand, and was equivalent to the paved path in terms of safety.
Only inside that range can some things be left for the child to decide for real.
Autonomy is not handing a child the responsibility and stepping back. It is adults building the boundary — and then not taking every answer away with them.
How we let a choice actually happen
Looking at what we do at those forks, three things stand out. We describe them as things we pay attention to, not as a procedure.
Let every answer stand. This is not only to avoid fake choices. More importantly, when either answer can stand, the child’s attention can stay on what they want rather than on guessing what the adult wants. If one side conceals the correct answer, the child’s attention shifts from “which way do I want to go?” to “which way does the adult want me to go?”, and those are two entirely different kinds of thinking.
Let the result belong to the child. Once the choice is made, adults do not rush to label it: brave, timid, right, wrong. “You’re so brave” and “Never mind, try again next time” sound like praise and kindness respectively, but they do the same thing. When an adult immediately grades a choice as brave, timid, right or wrong, the choice can start to feel like another kind of test.
The meta-analysis has a counterpart to this: when a choice was followed by a reward, the effect was cancelled out. It connects with a separate piece we have written about rewards.
Start with small choices. The younger the child, the less a choice needs to matter. A good choice is one whose consequences the child can bear. A fork in the trail, a footing, whether to rest first: that is already enough.
We are increasingly inclined to keep choices within what a child can carry. For a five- or six-year-old, a decision that affects whether today’s walk can be finished is not freedom. It is pressure.
At home, too, some real small decisions can be left to the child
Not every matter needs to be put to the child, and this is not about handing over adult responsibility. It is about letting the child’s answer actually take effect where it can.
Bath first, or pack the school bag first. The left path or the right one at the weekend. Try it yourself first, or ask for help.
In the kinds of small choices we are describing, what matters is not how big the options are, but whether the child’s answer is allowed to count.
What we know, and what we don’t
The three things above are drawn from practice in the field; they are not experimental results. We have not run a control group, and we have not recorded which children chose which path or what happened afterwards.
The effect size in the Patall meta-analysis is d = 0.30: stable, but not large. And it explicitly shows no significant effect on learning outcomes, so this piece cannot be read as “more choices will make your child learn better”. What it supports is motivation, and that feeling of “I can do this”.
Those studies were mostly run in classrooms or laboratories: choosing a homework assignment, a topic, an order. Not one was on a hillside trail. So what the research measured and what we see at the fork are two things that echo each other, not the same thing. Nor did the research come first: we had been leaving forks in our routes for years before we found, while writing this up, that someone had measured it.
One more thing is worth saying. That analysis could not test the influence of culture; the authors say so themselves, because the sample did not vary enough to run the test. So the sentence “this applies to children in Taiwan too” currently has no evidence for it, and no evidence against it.
We also do not know how many choices in a day is about right. The research found the strongest effects with two to four consecutive choices, but that was in homework-type settings; whether the number is the same on a hillside, we have no answer.
Why we take children outside
At the end of that day, every child had walked into the narrow track.
But it would not have mattered if someone had chosen the other side. What matters is not which path a child chose.
It is those dozen or so seconds in which the child stopped for the first time, looked at both sides, felt for themselves, and decided where the next step would go.
This happens all the time outdoors. How to step on a stone. Whether to stop on a slope. Which way a path goes.
So we take children outdoors not only so that they can see more of the world.
It is also because once you are in the real world, some things cannot be decided for you by anyone else: how to take the next step, when to stop, whether you can still keep going.
These are the kinds of small decisions through which we give children room to practise judgement.