Intervention Strategies to Elicit MVPA in Preschoolers during Outdoor Play

Abstract

Approximately 50% of preschoolers do not meet physical activity recommendations and children who reside in low-income rural communities may be further at risk for higher levels of sedentary behavior. Outdoor play is essential for preschool children; however, literature is unclear as to which types of interventions elicit moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) for all preschoolers. The aim of this study was to determine which type of intervention, physical activity or fundamental motor skill focus, elicits MVPA during outdoor play. Ninety-eight preschool children (M age = 4.48 years) from one Head Start center participated in an outdoor play intervention two days per week for 7 weeks. Classes were randomly assigned to one of four groups: fundamental motor skill focus (FMS), physical activity focus (PA), FMS and PA (FMS + PA), and control. An accelerometer worn on the hip measured MVPA. Results showed that age, sex and group assignment contributed to MVPA at the beginning of the intervention and age, sex, group assignment and MVPA during the beginning of the intervention contributed to MVPA at the end of the intervention. Overall, the FMS + PA group elicited MVPA from males and females of all ages. Interventions that combine both FMS and PA may reduce physical activity disparities in preschool children.

Strategies for Teachers to Promote Physical Activity in Early Childhood Education Settings—A Scoping Review

“…There was none that came from any Asian territory (the largest and most populous continent). Most of the studies (68%) adopted the design of clustered randomized controlled trials (RCT), five of which randomized by class/classroom [20,[40][41][42][43] and eight of which randomized by school/center [21,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. The other five studies used a within-subject design [51][52][53][54][55] and the remaining one was classified as an observational study [56].…”

“…The other five studies used a within-subject design [51][52][53][54][55] and the remaining one was classified as an observational study [56]. Nine of the 19 studies were conducted in preschools [20,21,[40][41][42][43]45,50,51] and eight of them were conducted in ECEC services [46][47][48][49][52][53][54][55]. Aivazidis et al's [44] study was conducted in kindergartens whereas Dunn et al's [56] study was conducted in elementary schools (kindergarten sections).…”

“…Aivazidis et al's [44] study was conducted in kindergartens whereas Dunn et al's [56] study was conducted in elementary schools (kindergarten sections). The interventions of all reviewed studies were implemented by school teachers [21,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56], except Alhassan et al's [20] which was implemented by school teachers and research staff. Sample sizes across the included studies varied from five to 1154 participants.…”

“…Most of the included studies adopted more than one of the above strategies in their programs. Ten studies involved fundamental movement skills practice [40,41,43,44,[46][47][48][49]53,55], eight of them implemented game elements [20,21,42,44,[48][49][50]53], seven of them implemented musical activities [20,40,42,44,45,51,53], three of them provided portable equipment and supplies [21,46,48], three of them integrated physical activity with other literacies such as language and numeracy [21,42,52], three of them involved teacher modeling and/or participation in physical activity [21,46,51], three of them adopted mastery motivational climates [43,54,55], two of them involved fitness components [53,56], one of them incorporated physical activity-related behavioral skill training [41] and one of them emphasized coordination and perception skills [50].…”

“…The two remaining ones specified days of observation due to the nature of the study ([51]: 12 to 19 days of observation; [56]: one full school-day observation). In terms of frequency, eight of the 19 studies implemented physical activity sessions daily (or five days per week) [21,40,41,45,46,50,51,53], whereas five of them implemented the sessions three to four times per week [20,42,44,48,49] and three of them implemented them twice per week [43,54,55]. Duration of the implemented strategies ranged from a minimum of 10 min to a maximum of 60 min per session.…”