Gender Anxiety Control Through the Outdoor Education Program

Abstract

Physical Education programs that focus on the physical, social, mental, and emotional development such as found in Outdoor Education programs, might be implemented as a potential activity to improve anxiety control. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of an Outdoor Education’s Hiking program based on Experiential Learning method on gender anxiety control. The subjects consisted of 62 male and 16 female students from the Physical Education and Health Department at the Indonesia University of Education. Subjects were divided into an experimental and a control group. The Anxiety Scale consisted of 24 questions modified from The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) developed by Liebowitz. (1987). The results after four weeks intervention (12 sessions) showed that male experimental group has significant difference on control level of anxiety compared to the female experimental group (0<0.25). From the result of this study it can be recommended that the Outdoor Education Hiking program through Experiential Learning methods can be implemented as a method to control anxiety especially for male.