Dimensions Underlying an Outdoor Leadership Curriculum

The dimensions underlying an outdoor education curriculum were investigated. The Wilderness Education Association (WEA) curriculum contains 19 points – 1 overarching point (judgment) and 18 other items. Twenty four instructors rated the extent of similarity between pairs of curriculum points, resulting in 171 ratings for each instructor. These paired ratings were subjected to multidimensional scaling, a statistical technique aimed at uncovering underlying dimensions of subjective judgments of similarity. The resulting analysis yielded five dimensions with stress (goodness of fit) = .147 and RSQ (correlation squared) = .58. Graphical presentations of these dimensions are shown. The results indicate dimensions of time (before and during the trip), movement and progress, safety, reacting to one’s surroundings, and a deliberation/intuition dimension. Implications for reorganizing a curriculum were discussed