Adolescent Interest and Physical Activity Fluctuation in Technology-Integrated Physical Education

Background/Purpose: Adolescents’ physical activity and their interest in participating in sports decline in middle school. While research has indicated that adolescents favor technology usage in education and that technology could be used to promote physical activity and situational interest, few have reported technology integration to promote conceptual learning in physical education. This study examined adolescents’ situational interest and physical activity fluctuation during five consecutive technology-integrated concept-based physical education lessons.

Method: Sixth grade students (N=53) were placed into an experiment group that utilized technology-integrated resources (iPads and applications), or a comparison group that did not utilize technology during the five physical education lessons with content centering upon the conceptual understanding of relative physical activity intensity, heart rate, and energy expenditure. Physical activity was tracked throughout the lessons by ActiGraph accelerometers. Interest was assessed through the Situational Interest Scale (Chen et al., 1999) that students completed at the end of each lesson. The physical activity and situational interest data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with repeated measure in both the technology-integrated physical education lessons and those of the comparison group.

Analysis/Results: Overall, the students participating in the technology-integrated physical education lessons reported significantly lower amounts of time participating in MVPA, took less steps during each lesson and had less physical activity related energy expenditure than their counterparts in the comparison group (λ = .65, F= 94.51, p < .05, η² = .65). In addition, the students in the experiment group did not report higher situational interest with the introduction of technology-integrated resources into their physical education lessons (F= 5.81, p > .05, η² = .02). A group × lesson interaction suggested that adolescents’ steps steadily increased through the five lessons in the technology group while they remained relative stable in the comparison group (F= 149.07, p < .05, η² = .37).

Conclusions: Contrary to findings of technology interventions for physical activity (Sun, 2012), this study suggested that utilizing technology-integration to increase a students’ situational interest or physical activity level may not be the most effective method in a relatively short duration of physical education lessons. The application-based technologies (iPads) required little or no physical activity to engage, rather they required cognitive thinking and execution to complete the instructional tasks and fulfill the goal of increasing students’ conceptual content knowledge which may have negatively affected the students’ physical activity and interest levels.