Enjoying Nature, Questioning Agency: Changes in Children’s Environmental Attitudes After a One-Week Residential Outdoor Education

Residential outdoor-education programs provide an intensive form of experiential learning in natural settings and are widely expected to strengthen children’s connection to nature and environmental agency, yet evidence that brief programs are associated with changes in established environmental attitudes is mixed. We compared children’s environmental attitudes and connection to nature at the beginning and end of a one-week residential program at Slovenian outdoor-education centers (1396 questionnaires; grades 5–8). Composite scores suggested that only enjoyment of nature changed. Measurement analyses qualified this picture: scalar invariance was rejected for the responsibility and oneness subscales under both continuous and ordinal estimation, and the responsibility items moved in opposite directions—two personal-efficacy items declined while a non-interference item rose—so that their average showed no change. In exploratory rescoring, a two-item measure of personal environmental efficacy was lower at the end of the week (d = −0.24), a decline replicated in held-out schools across 500 random splits, while enjoyment of nature was higher than the composite indicated (d = 0.21). Without a comparison group, these differences cannot be attributed to the program, but they suggest that enjoyment of nature and perceived environmental agency need not move together and that composite scoring can conceal such divergence.