Gabriel Pattenden
The Immersive Classroom: The Influence of Experiential Learning on Student Understanding
Biography
My name is Gabriel Pattenden and it was not long ago that I took a class trip to the Royal Ontario Museum and developed a passion for learning. Now, many trips through life later, I will be an alumni of Toronto Metropolitan University with an undergraduate degree in Professional Communication and a double minor in English and Human Resources Management, in 2025.
Throughout my post-secondary academic journey, I have carried this same passion for learning and been given the opportunity for it to continually grow. My program at TMU has allowed me to expand and develop the skills I needed in order to further develop this passion, applying them in both my academic and professional career.
I have utilized my studies and developed skills to focus on communication in the education sphere, exploring how education is communicated correlates to its influence on students. Throughout this process I am now not only eager to continue pursuing education, but to now educate others as well. I carried this approach as I held a communication education intern position at the Royal Ontario Museum, in 2024, a rewarding full-circle experience.
Details of Project
This research explores the impact of experiential learning on student understanding, engagement, and retention, examining how these innovative forms of education compare to traditional classroom methods. While experiential learning has been established as a viable and beneficial mode of teaching, the most effective forms have yet to be established and how factors such as structure, collaboration, and location influence educational outcomes.
Based on these goals, this study aimed to answer three key questions:
- How do outdoor experiences differentiate compared to indoor experiences in student engagement
- How do social factors of experiential learning impact the effectiveness of educational outcomes?
- Does experiential learning contribute to fostering a sense of community, how does this influence students beyond the classroom and inspire action?
To investigate these questions, data was collected from over 30 case studies, social media pieces (vlogs, blogs), testimonials, lesson reports, curriculum plans, and scholarly sources. A qualitative content analysis categorized learning experiences by engagement level, long-term impact, instructional design, location, curriculum, and student role.
The findings revealed that 94% of outdoor experiential learning cases resulted in students developing personal connections to the subject matter they were learning about, while indoor cases were lower, they still had a significant impact of 64% developing personal connections to subject matter. 94% of collaborative activities resulted in high levels of student engagement and positive educational outcomes, such as understanding and retention. 85% of outdoor community-based experiential learning cases, such as community projects, human rights campaigns, and local history trips, motivated students to further be involved in their community. Outdoor education and community-based projects ranked the highest in terms of engagement and knowledge retention, while unstructured field trips ranked the lowest.
These results suggest that structured and intentional experiential learning opportunities positively impact student engagement and concept understanding, building a sense of community through fostering self-directed passions and collaboration. Experiential learning should be prioritized in education policies and integrated into curriculum to enhance the student experience. Schools and policymakers should invest in more structured, interactive, and real-world experiences to ensure learning extends beyond the classroom. This research provides a framework for future educators to implement experiential learning, fostering an immersive classroom and creating a more curious generation of learners.