PROmoting Early Childhood Outside 2.0

Summary

Licensed early learning and childcare centres (ELCCs) can provide children with rich opportunities for outdoor play that they may not otherwise experience in their home or community. However, many ELCCs struggle to provide high quality and stimulating outdoor play time. The primary aim of this study is to develop, implement and test a comprehensive multi-component project, the PROmoting Early Childhood Outside (PRO-ECO), to build capacity for, and address the complexities of building support for outdoor play in early childcare centre settings. This is to ultimately increase children's access to engaging outdoor spaces for play.

The overarching goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a comprehensive multi- component project, called the PROmoting Early Childhood Outside (PRO- ECO). This project is to increase children's outdoor play and the diversity of outdoor play behaviour in Canadian ELCC settings providing full-day licensed care for preschoolers. PRO-ECO integrates development of policies and procedure, early childhood educator (ECE) training and mentorship, outdoor space modifications and, parent/caregiver engagement.

The PRO-ECO project will be co-developed, implemented and evaluated in partnership with provincial childcare organizations and ten ELCCs. A wait-list control cluster randomised trial design (RCT) will evaluate the effectiveness of the project and how it can be modified to tackle barriers in diverse settings.

This project is an extension of the PRO-ECO pilot study (protocol ID H20-03912-A001, Clinicaltrials.gov ID NCT05073380).

Conditions

• Child Development

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Project Group - PRO-ECO Project

The PRO-ECO project will be tailored to individual sites. Through collection of focus group and baseline data, the project will be further refined to provide site-specific adjustments, such as specific materials in the built environment design modification or targeted training. Identified features of effective projects outlined in the literature have informed the development of the project foundation and potential tailoring.

BEHAVIORAL

Wait List Group - Normal Daily Practice

ELCCs that are randomly assigned to the waitlist group will participate in their normal daily practice, including standard curriculum and outdoor play time. Once post-data collection is complete, wait list sites will be given the PRO-ECO project.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Government of Canada

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• University of British Columbia

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Mariana Brussoni · University of British Columbia

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

30 Months

Max Age

99 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-09-01

Primary Completion

2024-10-24

Completion

2025-03-20

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations