An investigation the impact of adventure based outdoor education on managarial skill

This study was designed to investigate the impact of adventurebased outdoor education on managarial skill. Since there is no specifically developed scale to measure this phenomena, it was first decided to develop psychometrically sound scale the evaluate outcomes of adventure based education. In the first step of scale development, literature review and ideas of individuals who have extensive knowledge of adventure based education to create a items? pool. They were also asked to evaluate those items in terms of content validity. This process resulted in the development of 80 items. Next, these items were evaluated by assessment and evaluation specialists. According to their advice, the scale was revised and by doing so, half of the items were positivelty worded and the rest were negatively worded.The final version of scale was administered to 302 participants who were voluntariry completed the scale while they were in adventure based education trainning. The exploratory factor analysis was used to test sub scale structure. Total of 40 items meaningfully loaded on 9 factors. The alpha level of subscales ranged from .47 to .82. The internal-consistency level of total scale was .96. These 9 factors accounted for 58,26% explained variance.After the structure of the scale was confirmed, Outdoor Management Development Scale (ODMS) was administered to 23 subjects who were participated two days of adventure based education program. The participants completed the scale before and after the program (pre-test and post-test). Two days adventure based education program included briefing (comfort zone, experiental education), debriefing, 3 high rope activities , 1 low rope activity and 2 initiative games.The results of the study revealed that outdoor management development education had positive significant effect on managarial skill of the participants (p<.05), in two subscales; time management and planning and clarity of aim. Further, there were also statistically significant differences of willingness of participation (p<.05) and perception of positive effect on life (p<.05). On the other hand, there were no statistically significant differences of gender, educational level, and marital status of participants (p>.05). The results were further discussed and elobrated.