Children's Physical Activity Distribution: Before, During, and After School

Background/Purpose: While school physical education is considered the most cost-effective program for health promotion and disease prevention, its function to adequately fulfill physical education objectives, especially in promoting children's physical activity (PA), has been questioned due to its marginalized condition (McKenzie, 2003, 2007). The purpose of the study was to examine how much PA children could get in schools providing daily physical education class. More specifically, the study would examine differences in school children' PA amount among three periods of time in school days: before-school, during-school, and after-school period when daily physical education class was provided.

Method: The Self-Administered Physical Activity Checklist (Sallis et al., 1996), a valid and widely used PA assessment tool at school settings, was administered to 138 middle school children (72 girls and 68 boys) in a middle school on three different school days (except Monday) during a one-week period. The time of PA and moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA), which were identified based on published compendium of PA (Ainsworth et al., 2000), on the three school days were averaged respectively to represent daily PA level in school days. All the participants took daily physical education class at the semester of date collection. One-way repeated-measures ANOVA was used to examine differences in PA amount among the three time frames (before-, during-, and after-school periods).

Analysis/Results: the overall F tests revealed significant differences in PA time (p < .001, η2 = .36) and MVPA time (p <. 001, η2 = .32) respectively among the three time frames. Specifically, mean and SD values of PA minutes and MVPA minutes for before-school period were 7.60±14.57 and 4.17±10.39, constituting 7.85% of daily PA and 6.03% of daily MVPA amount, respectively. Results for during-school period were 30.97±18.32 and 19.34±13.68, constituting 32.00% of daily PA and 28.20% of daily MVPA amount. Results for after-school period were 58.19±79.15 and 45.14±69.00, constituting 60.14% of daily PA and 65.77% of daily MVPA amount.

Conclusions: Physical education classes, even daily ones, could not provide children with recommended PA amount. After-school period is the time in which children get PA and MVPA most. It seems that programs promoting after-school PA is a necessary supplement to PE classes and the school PE needs to expand its program to after-school period to more effectively promote children's daily PA level.