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November/December 2000
As obesity rises and activity levels fall, many schools are trying
new phys ed curricula that aim to teach students healthy practices that will
last a lifetime.
By Sara-Ellen Amster
Remember how discouraging it was in gym class to always get stuck out in
right field during softball games or to be the first one eliminated in dodge
ball? Remember the embarrassment of futilely trying to do chinups or climb a
rope in front of 30 other kids? For many adults, attitudes about physical
fitness and health were shaped by demoralizing experiences in physical
education (PE) class—a factor that may in part help explain that while
athletes and models are idealized in the popular press, obesity and inactivity
among the general population persist.
Now some schools are working with education and health researchers to
implement new PE programs that are more engaging and exciting for all children.
This development is fueled by a spate of recent studies showing that an
increasing number of young people spend their free time gulping snacks or fast
foods, watching TV, listening to CDs, surfing the Internet, and playing video
games, rather than playing outdoors with friends.
The percentage of overweight young people—14 percent of children
aged 6 to 11 and 12 percent of those aged 12 to 17—has more than doubled
in the past 30 years. From 1991 to 1997, daily participation in physical
education dropped from 42 to 27 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Less than 20 percent
of students who live within a mile of school walk there. In fact, almost half
of young people aged 12 to 21 and more than one-third of high school students
get no vigorous exercise on a regular basis, says the CDC.
Girls—and especially minority girls—are on average less
active than boys, and their participation in PE drops off once they hit middle
school, according to a nationwide study of adolescent physical activity
published in the June
2000 issue of the journal Pediatrics. In the study, researchers at
UNC’s Carolina Population Center argue that
American kids, especially minority girls, don’t get enough exercise. Drawn
from an analysis of the 1996 National
Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health of 17,766 middle and high school
students, the study shows that only 21.3 percent of all adolescents participate
in PE classes at least once a week.
These trends come at a time when PE programs are easy targets for
budget cuts, as schools divert resources from classes and activities deemed "nonessential" toward more obvious needs, such as technology purchases and
preparation for standardized tests. Only Illinois requires a daily PE class for
all K–12 public-school students.
Yet in a country of couch potatoes where heart disease, hypertension,
and adult-onset diabetes are rampant, teaching kids the value of exercise is
essential, says Howell Wechsler, a researcher in the CDC’s division of
adolescent and school health who specializes in PE. "I think a lot of people
are starting to understand the reality of the childhood obesity problem, which
has grave con sequences if it’s not reversed. Policymakers must start
realizing you just can’t ignore this. Something must be done."
The CDC is supplying seed money to school projects in 20 states and two
cities—Milwaukee and New York—in an effort to boost physical
activity, improve nutrition, and reduce tobacco use among young people, says
Wechsler. These programs aim to demonstrate how schools can put into practice
the CDC’s 1997 "Guidelines
for School and Community Programs to Promote Lifelong Physical Activity Among
Young People," which encourages teaching physical fitness skills and habits
kids can take with them into adulthood.
In September, the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) began a new study of adolescent girls, especially minorities, that
seeks to uncover ways both inside and out of school that will make girls more
interested in physical activity and fitness. Researchers will experiment with
PE programs at 30 schools, trying to make them more interesting to students and
link the programs to community agencies. After analyzing the interventions,
researchers hope to learn whether physical activity levels increased and what
connection, if any, that would have to academic performance, says Elaine Stone,
a health science administrator at the NIH. "We hope to turn this decline [in
children’s health] around, so that later on there’s less obesity and
sedentary behavior and lower health-care costs."
The New PE
The NIH is not alone in its judgment that in order to improve
children’s health we need to change the way PE classes are structured.
Across the country, educators and researchers are experimenting with ways to
make physical education more relevant to students’ lives, so that students
learn that exercise can be an enjoyable and satisfying part of life.
The new PE makes fitness fun and leaves no one on the bench. In most
cases, that means doing away with highly competitive team sports that leave
many kids on the margins of gym class and those dreaded fitness tests (chinups,
situps, laps on the track, etc.) that can publicly humiliate many students.
It means adding a greater variety of games and activities, especially
those for small groups, so that all students will enjoy PE, not just athletes.
The best programs, say researchers, emphasize cooperation and fair play while
making sure everyone gets an equal chance to participate. Nontraditional sports
such as skateboarding, handball, and dance may find a place in the curriculum,
particularly if children request them.
"We need more sports where everyone can play," says Susan Wooley,
executive director of the American School Health
Association (ASHA). "For the athletically inclined, interscholastic sports
are great, but the kid who is obese and uncoordinated is not going to get
picked and will sit on the bench." In addition, research shows that team sports
do not interest girls as much as individual and dual activities, according to
the NIH’s Stone.
Schools that teach mainly team sports do not adequately prepare
students for physical fitness as adults, says James Sallis, a
San Diego State University psychologist who
researches physical education. "High schools focus on football, basketball,
soccer, and other team sports, but the percentage of adults who do those kinds
of things is in the single digits. It’s better to teach jogging, tennis,
and brisk walking. Why couldn’t a high school gym look more like a fitness
center?" In addition, many schools have too little or inadequate sports
equipment. Teaching 30 students to play basketball with three balls is like
"trying to teach reading to a class of 30 with three books," says Sallis.
George Graham, a professor of physical education at Virginia Tech University, adds, "Kids are better off
without some physical education programs. They turn kids off to physical
activity and convince them they are no good [at exercise]. You go into a gym
and see a few kids playing basketball and many sitting in the bleachers."
That rings a bell with Sean Gardner, 17, a recent graduate of Hamilton
High School in Los Angeles, where PE was required daily through sophomore year.
He says some of his classmates balked at PE. "A lot of kids were lazy or they
weren’t that good at sports and sometimes that would slow down the kids
who did want to participate. I’d say the best thing we could do for them
is give [disinterested students] more attention and find the things they like
to do."
An ‘Alphabet of Movement’
SPARK (Sports, Play,
and Active Recreation for Kids) is one innovative K–6 PE program
currently being used in 700 schools across 16 states. The program emphasizes
using small teams to help build both athletic and social skills. For example,
in a SPARK softball game, teams are made up of just five players. When a batter
hits the ball, fielders must toss it to every player before the batter reaches
home. This keeps everyone involved and active in the game, and leads to less
goofing off, say teachers who use the program. Soccer is different, too, played
on mini-fields by teams of three. SPARK aims to teach kids self-control and an
acceptance of personal differences—concepts that can benefit classroom
management in other subjects, says executive director Paul Rosengard.
Perhaps SPARK’s most successful project is found in the Memphis
schools, which contain all of the ingredients of a large urban district (with
102 elementary schools serving 66,000 students, 86 percent of them African
American). Phyllis Richie of the University of
Tennessee studied SPARK in 19 public and private schools in the Memphis
area for two years. Students in the SPARK program were far more active in gym
class—in motion at least 50 percent of the time—than students in the
control schools taking traditional gym classes. Encouraged by the findings, the
city school board plans to hire 250 physical education specialists over the
next four years and increase PE classes for K–6 students to a mandatory
four days a week.
Another well-studied project is CATCH PE, which is used in more than 1,000
schools in 30 states. CATCH PE, like SPARK, sprang from research supported by
the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. In a three-year trial
at 96 elementary schools, CATCH PE was employed to improve children’s
health, especially cholesterol levels, by reducing saturated fat in school
lunches and increasing time spent engaged in moderate to vigorous activity
during PE. Many of the physical education concepts of CATCH, now known as the
Coordinated Approach to Child Health, are similar to SPARK. But this program
also has a "substantial classroom component" focused on family intervention,
smoking prevention, and nutrition, says Thomas McKenzie, a professor of
physical education at San Diego State University who helped develop both CATCH
and SPARK.
CATCH teaches instructors to reduce the time needed for set-up and to
reject elimination games, which can make some kids disinterested by sidelining
them, says Peter Cribb, CATCH project director for the
University of Texas Health Science Center. For
example, instead of sitting down on the bleachers, children who are declared "out" in a game of tag are given reentry tasks, such as jumping rope, before
they can rejoin the game, he says. "The CATCH curriculum reflects a fundamental
change in what our goals are," says Cribb. Experts who once urged PE teachers
to "test, test, test" now say PE testing is less important than inspiring
children to choose activities they enjoy and to remain physically active, he
says.
More than 650 elementary schools in Texas have adopted CATCH PE, says
Cribb, and the University of Texas has trained staff at 300 of them.
A study of CATCH by the
NIH has found that its lessons persisted into early adolescence for
self-reported dietary and physical activities. That’s important because
middle school is seen as the next critical step for physical education, the
place where many children begin to opt out of exercise.
The Exemplary Physical Education Curriculum (EPEC) features more basic
lessons geared toward elementary schools. It is used in 10 states, most
prominently in Michigan, where 700 PE teachers use the program in half of the
state’s districts. EPEC has been adapted and extended to middle schools
for the current school year, and will be further adapted for high schools.
Students learn how to set up a personal exercise program and monitor
their progress, says Glenna DeJong, developer of the nonprofit program. EPEC
teaches students "an alphabet of movement" that prepares them for a variety of
fitness activities, she says. She adds that EPEC emphasizes social skills,
including compassion, putting forth the best effort possible, being
responsible, and being flexible. "We hold teachers and students accountable,"
she says. "We don’t believe just running kids around is physical
education. We could pay a playground supervisor to do that."
Linda Brown, a physical education teacher for 27 years, says she was
apprehensive about using the program, but that it improved her effectiveness by
teaching her how to keep all the kids active at once and give students
instruction on physical movement in basic steps. The kids get homework
assignments just as they do in academic subjects, says Brown. They may have to
throw a ball the correct way against a wall 10 times or teach a family member
to skip.
Lifetime Fitness
Many high schools are also experimenting with new types of physical
education. One such program—Fitness for Life, Personal Fitness, and
Conceptual Physical Education—is used by schools for dependents of U.S.
military personnel and by high schools in seven states. Unlike traditional
physical education programs that may focus on team sports, these programs are
designed to help each student develop a personal lifetime fitness program, says
Charles B. Corbin of Arizona State University, Tempe.
Corbin co-authored a textbook that is commonly used in such courses, and also
co-authored the 1998 Physical Activity Guidelines for Children, published by
the National Association for
Sport and Physical Education. Students learn to adopt a holistic approach
to physical fitness, focusing on self-management skills, learning to eat well,
exercising to manage stress, and building consumer skills such as selecting a
fitness club or evaluating a fitness video. Computer fitness programs aid both
teachers and students in the course.
A lifetime of good health begins with a few small steps, say proponents
of this new PE. With the release of increasingly bleak studies of
children’s health, schools may need to sharpen their dual focus on
developing students’ minds and bodies. "If we cankeep children healthy and
well and resistant to disease, then they are not going to be able to realize
the academic successes that they’ve had," says Judy Young, executive
director of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. While
making a connection between physical fitness and academic achievement is
dubious—is it even necessary to do so?—few would dispute the
worthiness of teaching students to make physical fitness a lifetime aim.
Sara-Ellen Amster, a former assistant editor of the Harvard
Education Letter, is a graduate student at UCSD. She wrote about teaching
writing through pop culture in the July/August 2000 issue
For further information
American School Health Association, Susan Wooley, Executive
Director, PO Box 708, Kent, OH 44240; 330-678-1601; fax: 330-678-4526; email:
swooley@ashaweb.org.
CATCH PE, Peter Cribb, Director, Center for Health Promotion Research
and Development, 7320 North Mopac, Suite 204, Austin, TX 78731; 512-346-6163;
fax: 512-346-6802.
Center for the Advancement of Health, 2000 Florida Ave., NW, Suite
210,Washington, DC 20009-1231; 202-387-2829;
fax: 202-387-2857; email:
cfah@cfah.org. www.cfah.org
C.B. Corbin. Fitness for Life. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley
Longman, 1993.
Exemplary Physical Education Curriculum Project, Michigan Fitness
Foundation, PO Box 27187, Lansing, MI 48909; 517-347-7891; toll-free:
877-464-3732.
www.michiganfitness.org
P. Gordon-Larsen, R.G. McMurray, and B.M. Popkin. "Determinants of
Adolescent Physical Activity and Inactivity Patterns." Pediatrics 105,
no. 6 (June 2000): e83.
J.J. Kronenfeld. Schools and the Health of Our Children: Protecting
Our Future. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. www.sagepub.co.uk
National Association for Sport and Physical Education, 1900
Association Dr., Reston, VA 20191; 800-213-7193 ext. 410; fax: 703-476-8316;
email: naspe@aahperd.org.
PE Central, a website with lots of useful resources and information,
can be accessed at www.pecentral.org
J.F. Sallis, T.L. McKenzie et al. "Effects of Health-Related Physical
Education on Academic Achievement: Project SPARK." Research Quarterly for
Exercise and Sport 70, no. 2 (June 1999): 127–134.
SPARK Physical Education, Paul Rosengard, Executive Director, 6363
Alvarado Ct., Suite 250, San Diego, CA 92120; toll-free: 800-SPARK PE
(800-722-7573). www.foundation.sdsu.edu/projects/spark/index.html
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