Linden Mountain-SURF Fall 2024

Author: Linden Mountain | Major: Career & Technical Education | Semester: Fall 2024

Throughout the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 semesters, I have had the opportunity to conduct research studying educator perceptions of student physical activity. After working with Dr. Erin Howie Hickey, an Associate Professor with the Exercise Science department, for the past several semesters, I saw the unique intersect between exercise science and the education sphere. As a Career and Technical Education major with a minor in Biology, I plan to teach seventh through twelfth grade business classes following graduation in May. However, I began college as an Exercise Science major, so promoting physical activity has always been important to me. With this, Dr. H’s research that considers physical activity in school settings was of great interest to me. As a future educator, the new perspective that I wanted to bring to this research topic was to consider classroom teachers’ attitudes and opinions related to student physical activity, as teachers can play a key role in both encouraging and implementing physical activity.
My project began in conjunction with Dr. H’s Playworks study. Playworks is a program that offers training in how to best facilitate recess for educators from selected Arkansas public elementary schools. An intended component of my study was to compare educator perceptions of physical activity levels before and after receiving this Playworks training; however, I learned an important lesson that research can often move more slowly than anticipated. Despite emailing the principal at every eligible elementary school, too few responses were gathered to begin that project when expected. Because this affected the intended population of my survey regarding student physical levels, Dr. H and Chris Murphy, an Exercise Science PhD student, helped me brainstorm how I could still study educator perceptions without having access to this population of teachers who would receive the Playworks training. I adjusted my intended population to be any currently licensed Arkansas public school teacher, and I reached out to this population via word-of-mouth recruitment, by posting a flyer on social media, and by contacting school principals.
This change in target population meant that I would need to submit my own IRB rather than adding my survey to the previously approved Playworks study IRB. Once my IRB was approved, I reached out to contacts who work in education and shared the survey via social media. From this recruiting process, I was encouraged to learn that many in the education community were supportive and happy to help by passing my survey along! In all, I was able to analyze 52 responses from kindergarten through twelfth grade current Arkansas public school teachers. From these responses, I was able to draw conclusions regarding differences in kindergarten through sixth grade (K-6) and seventh through twelfth grade (7-12) teacher perceptions of student physical activity levels. The remainder of the Fall semester was spent analyzing these results and creating a webpage to communicate findings and share resources for educators. Dr. Sheri Deaton, Teaching Assistant Professor of Career and Technical Education, helped me choose the appropriate statistical analyses to compare responses. From the surveys, I gathered a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. For the quantitative data collected, T-Tests were used to compare the extent to which educators felt there was a lack of student physical activity outside of and within the school setting, as well as educators’ level of concern for lack of student physical activity levels. These T-Tests did not show that there was a significant difference between K-6 and 7-12 teacher responses. Survey respondents were also asked to indicate the amount power they felt they had to promote student physical activity, as well as the extent of steps they had taken to increase their students’ physical activity levels. Each response option was assigned a numerical value so that these questions could be compared using a Single Factor ANOVA test. From these analyses, I found that there was a significant difference in the level of steps K-6 and 7-12 educators have taken to promote physical activity. Finally, the responses reporting physical activity-related training that educators received were compared using Single Factor ANOVA tests, and these differences were not found to be significant.
In considering how to communicate these findings, I wanted to choose a channel that was easily accessible to educators and administrators. Therefore, I chose to create a website (linked here) that explains my findings using a reader-friendly design. Graphs and tables aim to display the results of the data analyses simply. I also included a ‘Resources’ page that highlights current research related to student physical activity and movement integration. This page includes links to websites that offer ideas for incorporating movement in the school setting, as I wanted the design to be most user-friendly for a classroom teacher. As I continue to refine this website into next semester, this resource page will be expanded and updated with the most current and pertinent research.

Moving forward, I am excited to implement these resources in my time as an intern and future teacher. Because 7-12 educators have taken significantly less steps to promote physical activity among students, this has encouraged me to seek out professional development related to student physical activity levels and to advocate for school and district-wide training about physical activity implementation!