This blog is based on episode 285 of the podcast Playing with Research in Health and Physical Education. The answers in the podcast script were written by Peter Iserbyt and are based on the article Generalization of Participation in Fitness Activities From Physical Education to Lunch Recess by Gender and Skill Level linked below. Risto and Alba were responsible for formatting the script into the following blog. This blog is almost verbatim from the podcast, so if you prefer the audio version, click here to access the link for the episode. All of the podcasts are listed by category on a Google doc that you can find as the pinned tweet on the account @theHPEpodcast on Twitter. Alternatively, you can find it here. You can find the full citation of the article and additional podcast episodes of CSPAP below.
Full Cite: Iserbyt, P., van der Mars, H., Drijvers, H., & Seghers, J. (2022). Generalization of Participation in Fitness Activities From Physical Education to Lunch Recess by Gender and Skill Level. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 1(aop), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2021-0091
CSPAP podcast episodes:
Episode 28: CSPAP research review and implications with Dr. Senlin Chen
Episode 73: CSPAPs with Dr. Collin Webster
Sport Education podcast episodes:
Episode 114: Sport Education Model Part 1 w/Dr. Tristan Wallhead
Episode 115: Sport Education Part 2 Planning a Unit
Episode 143: Pedagogy Seminar on Sport Education with Hastie and Wallhead
Introduction of authors:
RM: Hi, Risto here with George Mason University- I’m here with Peter Iserbyt from the Department of Movement Sciences, KU Leuven, in Belgium to discuss the article Generalization of Participation in Fitness Activities from Physical Education to Lunch Recess by Gender and Skill Level. This article was recently published with Hans van der Mars, Hannelore Drijvers, and Jan Seghers in the Journal of Teaching in Physical Education. You can find the full citation for this article in the notes. Welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us!
PI: Short greeting and acknowledgment of co-authors.
Hi, thank you Risto for the opportunity to be in your podcast and to talk about this paper, and the line of research on transfer from physical education to recess in general. Let me take a short moment to acknowledge my co-authors.
Hans van der Mars, my colleague, friend and mentor who was at Arizona State University, now emeritus professor
Hannelore Drijvers was a grad student
Jan Seghers – colleague in the department of Movement Sciences at KU Leuven
What initiated this work?
This project is part of a larger line of research that started in 2013. I was an assistant professor at that time and was invited by several organizations to talk about the role of physical education and its impact beyond the walls of the gymnasium. We were also in the midst of grant writing and looking for strong solid arguments on the position of physical education in the curriculum of K12 schools worldwide. We know that in most developed countries in the world, one goal of physical education is to develop a physically active lifestyle in school-aged youth. We know that in most developed countries in the world, one goal of physical education is to develop a physically active lifestyle in school-aged youth. However, when looking at the research we found that the evidence for this claim was poor. It has not been a focus for many researchers, and the research that has been done is less than optimal in terms of research designs and methodologies.
Also in the SHAPE standards, now in review, but in previous up until 2014 I guess, one of the standards stated: ‘participated regularly in physical activity’. Peter Hastie’s review in 2017 on the evidence whether these standards were met pointed out that there is very few evidence of a link between participation in physical education and out-of-school physical activity.
We studied the work by Jim Sallis, Thom McKenzie and colleagues in SPARK & M-SPAN, which inspired us a lot. We tried to investigate what the strengths and limitations in that work were.
Obviously, investigating the impact of physical education outside of the gymnasium in daily life and perhaps later in life comes with a lot of methodological challenges. In case of self-reports, I am not sure you can trust them (especially not with elementary school children), in the case of accelerometers, children might forget wearing them and you lose sight of context, which is critical for the work we had in mind.
So, I talked about this idea with Phil Ward, who had been a mentor since I was a PhD student working peer tutoring (peer assisted learning), and we came to a research design that would allow us to have more experimental control as well as to limit methodological barriers.
The idea was that instead of investigating out-of-school PA, why not start with ‘at-school PA’? This would allow us to measure children’s behavior more reliably. Second, we thought it would be a good idea to close the gap between the controlled setting of physical education and the very free setting of daily life – therefore, we decided to use lunch recess as the setting where we would organize a PA program that had the same content and equipment arrangement as that seen in the physical education lessons, but it was voluntary and less structured. As a framework, we used the CSPAP approach since physical education is at the core of a CSPAP and lunchtime recess is an important on-campus component.
Introduction to the article
RM: We have had a few episodes talking about CSPAP and I will link them to the notes, but it has been a while since we reviewed this framework. Can you give us an overview of what Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs are?
The podcast chaired by Hans van der Mars and led by Darla Castelli and Collin Webster; the one with Senlin Chen
CSPAP stands for Comprehensive Physical Activity Programs, introduced in 2013 by the CDC and SHAPE America. It actually goes back to a 2008 position statement by NASPE, and also a 2008 paper by Darla Castelli and Aaron Beighle in JOPERD.
Comprehensive stands for being an inclusive, multi-component, ecological model. It includes five components that create expanded opportunities for children to be physically active, namely physical education (core of CSPAP), physical activity during school, physical activity before and after school, community engagement, and staff involvement.
A CSPAP has two main goals:
To use all opportunities for students to be active and achieve the recommended 60 minutes of MVPA per day.
To provide coordination among the CSPAP components to maximize understanding, application, and practice of the knowledge of skills learned in physical education so that all students will be fully physically educated and well-equipped for a lifetime of physical activity.
It is the latter that was very important for our work, namely the ‘coordination of different components to apply and practice skills learned in physical education’. Herein lies the key to investigate physical education’s contribution, by investigating whether students engage in activities, use skills in different settings that were initially practiced/learned in physical education lessons.
RM: Thanks. So, can you expand on the idea of coordinating PE content with physical activity in recess? What are the benefits of having this approach?
PI: Response
Sure. There are a couple of observations worth mentioning here.
First, in our investigation (part of this was published by Drijvers et al. in 2021), we found that many schools (elementary and secondary) in Flanders offer physical activity opportunities during recess (e.g., 80% for secondary schools). However, we found no evidence that this was content that was taught, either previously or simultaneously, in physical education. So there was a clear disconnect, which we believed prevented any type of generalization to emerge. Thus, our reasoning was that if you teach some content in physical education and the learning tasks are designed appropriately so students are successful and learn, they might enjoy it and choose to participate in it voluntarily beyond the physical education lessons (i.e., during recess – the generalization setting). Obviously, you cannot participate in an activity if you do not have the skills to do so.
Second, we know that without any interventions during recess, MVPA is rather low, especially in secondary (post-primary) schools. We found that in these schools, MVPA levels remained below 10%. So not doing anything and just expect generalization to develop will not work. As far as elementary (primary) schools are concerned, we found that when physical activities during recess are directly linked with the content delivered during Physical education, it led to higher MVPA (especially VPA) compared to regular recess.
Third, acknowledging that in Flanders physical education is only scheduled for two lessons of one hour a week, while recess is scheduled everyday. In Flanders, schools are required to provide 50 minutes per day during lunch, so this opens a lot of (additional or expanded?) opportunities for physical activity.
So, these observations led us to a design in which we connected the content of physical education with the content of a physical activity program during the lunch period recess. This would allow children to apply what they practiced and learned in physical education in a less structured setting, thus demonstrating the contribution that physical education has on the development of a PA habits.
RM: Can you briefly explain the theory of Generalized Behavior Change?
PI: Response
Yes. It is a principle rather than a theory, actually. Establishing generality is a core characteristic of applied behavior analysis. In the context of this study, we consider that a behavior has generality if it occurs in a setting other than the setting in which it has been learned. In other words, if a student engages in a behavior (for example parkour, fitness) learned in physical education (which we call the training setting) in a different setting such as recess (which we call the generalization setting) we say that the behavior has generalized. In our work, we use participation in the content (fitness) as the target behavior, which leads to MVPA (but also skill trials as dependent variables). The latter is particularly interesting: in our parkour studies, children did not know about parkour and learned about it in Physical Education. So, when they performed those skills in recess, generalization was demonstrated.
Generalization is a very important principle in education. After all, you do not learn mathematics just to get high points on your mathematics tests in school. You have to learn it so that you become more effective in daily life, both in professional and private life (e.g., grocery shopping, keeping track of how you spend your money, calculate the volume of paint you need when painting your living room, and so on).
Another important thing about generalization, or transfer as some people would call it, is that it does not occur automatically. There need to be some environmental similarities in place to occasion the behavior, such as equipment, prompts by the teacher, and so on. We cannot expect students to engage in fitness activities automatically: it requires some careful programming in the environment so that the probability of engagement in fitness increases: some prompts, equipment, …, it should be learned, and as students become more familiar with it, you might decrease their dependence on very explicit environmental similarities.
Obviously, this is challenging and there are a lot of questions still unanswered. You can program more or less environmental similarities, or start with a lot and then fade them over time and see what happens. We tried to be balanced in programming similarities.
RM: So, can you tell us the purpose of this study?
PI: The goal of this study was to investigate the generalization of participation in fitness activities from physical education to a fitness recess program in middle school. Thus, the physical education lessons constituted the training setting and the fitness lunch recess program in which students could voluntarily participate was the generalization setting (i.e., independent variable). Students’ traditional lunch recess (i.e., the playground setting) served as the comparison setting.
Importantly, we know that as children move into adolescence their PA level drops substantially. So, this study was focused on students who had transitioned from primary to postprimary school. Consequently, they are at greater risk of decreased physical activity which made these students an important target group for research.
Methods
RM: Can you give us an overview of the methods used in this study?
PI: Response (basically a short overview of the methods section so listeners know what happened)
Yes. So we had a convenience sample of five schools in which we selected one or two classes and their physical education teacher. Those were students in the first year of secondary, post-primary school with an average age of 12 years.
The physical education teachers agreed to teach a 12-lesson sport education fitness season. They also agreed to organize 9 fitness recess sessions, 2 before the start of the sport ed season, 7 during the sport ed season, and one after the season had ended. The duration of fitness recess was about 20 minutes.
All teachers received a standardized content knowledge workshop to teach fitness of about 4 hours. Teachers nor students had prior experience with the Sport Ed model. The goal of the unit was that students, in their group, developed a fitness workout and taught it to their peer groups during a culminating event.
During fitness recess, the teacher installed the equipment that was used in the previous physical education lesson, which prompted students about what they had learned, and task cards were used so that students could work independent from the teacher. The teacher supervised and supported when needed. Teachers taught no new content.
Children were labelled as either lower, average, and higher skilled. Sex was taken into account as well.
Systematic observation by trained observers was used to investigate children’s PA level in fitness recess and regular recess. We had to combine video and live since video was not feasible during regular recess settings.
We used systematic observation, as we did in other studies. Luckily we now have developed an App, it is called the SOPA app (systematic observation of physical activity), available for free in the Apple Store. It only works with iPad. It included SOCARP, SOFIT, and is able to calculate reliabilities between observers. It was Kian Vanluyten, a PhD student in my team also working on generalization who took the lead in this and saved us hours of time.
RM: I will also link the podcast episodes on the sport education model to the notes as well. So, can you tell us how Sport Ed. was used in your intervention?
PI: Response
We developed a content knowledge packet for teaching fitness using the sport education model. A content knowledge packet contains the necessary knowledge that defines and explicitly describes the content to be taught to a specific grade level. It consists of teaching materials consisting of relational knowledge that shows how the content is progressively developed using different tasks.
Students were put in heterogeneous groups of five to six and stayed in those teams for the entire season.
Students performed different roles such as fitness trainer, coach, equipment manager, and captain. To foster team affiliation, students chose a country they represented during the season and created a team cheer/chant. The goal of the season was for each team to develop a fitness routine consisting of exercises to improve strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, and agility. During the first lessons, different fitness skills were practiced in a more teacher-centered format, and a focus was put on posture and safety while performing exercises. Early stages of the season also included students learning the behaviors when performing a certain role. The preseason phase was more coach- directed and focused on refining the performance of students in their different team roles. Fitness activities were refined and adapted to each student’s level, and content knowledge was developed. At the end of the season, during the culminating event, each team taught the other teams their fitness routine and received points from the other teams and the teacher on several criteria such as content of the routine and correct demonstration of the fitness exercises.
Fitness activities, defined as individual activities aimed at improving selected health- and skill-related fitness components (i.e., cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, agility, and coordination), were chosen as the content domain for physical education and the lunch recess program since fitness education is an important educational goal of physical education (Corbin & Le Masurier, 2014). Second, it has been recommended that schools design physical activity programs in which students can participate individually (i.e., are not dependent on others to participate) and that attract lower-skilled students and girls. Third, there is evidence that fitness is one of the few content domains that allows both boys and girls to achieve similar levels of physical activity during physical education lessons as it tends to be more structured (i.e., every student performing the same tasks) (McKenzie et al., 2000).
Findings and discussion
RM: What about the voluntary participation of the students in recess time? How did that change throughout the intervention and what does this finding imply?
PI: Response
Overall participation of students decreased over time. Especially in the last third of the intervention participation for both boys and girls, and for all skill levels, decreased. After the sport education season ended, this drop was substantial. This somehow aligns with previous research in elementary where we noticed that prior to the culminating event in sport education, participation in organized recess increased because children saw this as an important opportunity to prepare for their culminating event.
In behavioral terms, we would call the culminating event a “motivating operation”, which means that the value of participating in organized recess is increased because of the upcoming event that included between-team competition.
Overall, participation rates increased at the start of the fitness season in sport education with proportions of about 50% on average, but then dropped towards the end of the season and to below 20% after the season, with a 0% for the lower skilled.
It is important to note here is that we chose not to intervene during the season to promote participation. Basically, we instructed the teacher to notify students to join fitness recess after the physical education lesson. No other incentives such as posters, prompts by classroom teachers, and so on were in place because we wanted to standardize between schools and avoid losing experimental control. I am convinced that with some prompting procedures, perhaps tying participation to the sport education model, do some public posting on who participated, a point system, things could look different in a positive way.
RM: Were there any differences in the PA participation when comparing gender or skill-level? How does this align with previous research?
PI: Response
We actually found limited differences for sex and skill level. For sex, there were two fitness recess sessions where significantly more girls than boys participated. In general, girls had higher participation then boys. This is an important finding, since previous results with physical activity programs that are disconnected from physical education usually show much lower participation from girls (in Drijvers :25% girls vs 56% boys for postprimary). Also a study by Shu Cheng, grad student in my team, had a significant difference with more girls participating compared to boys in parkour recess (53% vs 35%).
For skill level, we found only one difference, namely in the first fitness recess session where significantly more higher-skilled students participated compared to their lower-skilled peers. Although not significant, we saw in the data that higher skilled had consistently higher proportions of participation compared to average- and lower skilled children. This is also an important finding, since studies on participation in physical activity programs usually demonstrated significantly more higher skilled students participating compared to lower skilled.
What was a crucial finding is that fitness recess led to a quadruple increase in overall MVPA! The impact on lower-skilled students was even higher, since they had 5% of MVPA during traditional recess compared to 40% during fitness recess. This is what makes the study so important as this approach to linking recess with physical education can become a major contributor to students’ total daily MVPA accumulation. In addition, there was no vigorous physical activity during traditional recess, whereas during fitness recess this was around 30%. Recess is a daily part of the school day, and thus creates large potential for physical activity.
Conclusion:
RM: In starting to wrap this up, you provide many suggestions of how future research can help better understand what you found in this study as well as improve students’ behavior change during recess. Can you please share some of these suggestions with us?
PI: Response
This study, together with the other studies by Coolkens et al. (2018) and Cheng et al. (2020; 2021) basically offer an important message: When you give students the opportunity to engage in the activity practiced in physical education during recess, a large proportion of children will do this. When they do, they will be more physically active then during traditional recess. As the other studies and ongoing work shows, it demonstrated that children use the skills practiced (learned) in physical education in another context. For example, in Cheng et al (PESP) we looked at skill trials during recess and found that children used skills they practiced in physical education at a high rate during recess. In other words, what they practiced (learned) in physical education allowed them to do this activity during recess. I think that is important.
I also want to emphasize that children have a choice during recess. Participation is voluntary which offers students the choice to participate in fitness or not, for example, to hang out with friends. Fitness recess was a choice, not a requirement, it also means that not the same students engage every day. It is empowering for students to be able to make their own choices.
Future work should replicate this with other content and students of different ages. As we all know, replication is the cornerstone of science and necessary to increase external validity. In our field, we have a bad habit of switching focus far too fast without building a solid evidence base.
In addition, it would be very interesting to investigate strategies to increase/maintain participation over the course of the season. In this study, no incentives were in place, but perhaps school personnel could be involved, participation in organized recess could be rewarded with team points on the sport education poster, social media could be involved,…I think there are quite some opportunities there. Obviously, we are acknowledging the fact that students should have a choice during recess.Also, this intervention did not require a substantial change for schools. No extra curriculum time, no excessive workload, just a teacher who opened the gym during recess and provision of equipment and prompts by the teacher.
RM: Thank you for joining us. It is interesting to see the dropout in the voluntary participation of the students in your research. While reading your study I was wondering which factors could have caused that as you also point out. I think that this study brings a great question and indeed a call for future research and interventions that can help us understand how to coordinate PE and recess to increase students’ participation and maintain that trend over time. You bring some great suggestions to how researchers can plan future interventions through replication. Listening to what students have to say, trying out different PA, or different pedagogical models could be good ideas. For those of you who want to read the full article, you can check out the full citation in the comments section.
O Hope you enjoy reading the full article.
Thanks for reading!