Cultivating personality development through outdoor education programme: the Malaysia experience

AbstractThe aim of this quasi experimental study is to identify the elements which may influenced personality development among participants in an outdoor education programme. The elements studied were gender, and the module used based on different sequence of outdoor activities conducted. This study also tries to prove that personality changes remain in the participants for a certain length of time. Research sample comprised of 671 students in physical education and, sports education and recreation programmes in Malaysia's higher education institutions and teacher training institutes. The control groups comprised of students whom are not undergoing the two programmes mentioned above. The translated version of the Life Effectiveness Questinnaire were used in this study. Kolb's Cycle of Learning through Experience is the theoretical framework used while the research framework is adapted from Carver's Outdoor Education Framework. Personality development measured are cooperation, leadership ability, self confidence and coping with change. Statistical analysis used is descriptive and inferential statistics. t-test conducted to determine the effect of the treatment given shows a significant difference in all the constructs involved in this study. Cohen's D shows that the treatment contributes greatly to leadership ability (60%) and coping with change (61%). Wilks’ Lambda in multiple analysis of variance shows that the outdoor education module used provide a significant difference and high contribution (F=30.78, p<0.05; ή2= 0.57) to changes in personality development among the participants. Multiple regression were use to determine the effect of two predictors (gender and module) on changes of personality attributes among the participants. The programme module predicts significantly for cooperation (rpmodule= 0.50, p<0.05). Gender predicts significantly for self efficacy (rpgender= 0.52, p