UW’s Kern Leads US and Wyoming Physical Education Database Project

While reading, writing and math skills among school-age children are closely monitored, students’ access to health-promoting physical activity and physical education is less documented, resulting in a lack of credible evidence that young people are learning the lifelong benefits of staying healthy through physical activity.

Ben Kern, an assistant professor with the University of Wyoming’s Division of Kinesiology and Health, part of the College of Health Sciences, is serving as the principal investigator on the creation and implementation of the first-ever U.S. Physical Education and Physical Activity Policy (US-PEPAP) Implementation Interactive Database Project. It will provide up-to-date and accurate information regarding student access to school-based PE and other physical activity opportunities in every U.S. state, with a special emphasis on Wyoming.

The database will feature an interactive design for people to access data for the purpose of secondary research analysis, advocacy or grant writing in an efficient and user-friendly manner.

“This project is one of a kind, and it will provide clear documentation of the access kids have or don’t have to physical education and physical activity in every U.S. state,” Kern says. “At last, we have data we can use to advocate for greater student access to, as well as conduct research on the impacts of, PE and physical activity. Without these data, researchers and advocates are extremely limited, and I am so glad that UW is supporting this important project.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over the past three decades, time allotted for PE and physical activity in schools has drastically decreased. A major factor in this reduction is the high-stakes accountability system that initially was enacted through the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2004, requiring that all U.S. students be proficient in reading, writing and mathematics as determined by performance on standardized tests. To improve student achievement scores, many school policymakers chose to reduce instructional time for nontested subjects, such as PE, and other noninstructional time, such as recess.

Primary suppliers of data for US-PEPAP are PE teachers. To date, Kern and his team of researchers distributed US-PEPAP to about 95,000 PE teachers in all 50 U.S. states. US-PEPAP captured accurate data regarding student access to school-based PE instruction and other physical activity opportunities, such as recess, before/after school and weekend physical activity programming. Now, with Kern’s new web-based database access, all of the resulting data will be accessible to anyone worldwide.

The Division of Kinesiology and Health graduates about 15 PE teachers each year, and about 90 percent of them remain and practice in Wyoming.

To create the interactive dashboard, Kern secured the services of UW’s Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) and UW Division of Kinesiology and Health graduate student Erica Meyers, who is jointly funded by the School of Computing and the Division of Kinesiology and Health. WyGISC’s Shannon Albeke leads the technology setup of the dashboard, and Meyers is both a contributor to design and one of the first to conduct secondary research analysis as part of her master’s thesis.

US-PEPAP also will include collaborations with the Wyoming Department of Education and Laramie County Community College (LCCC). This will allow LCCC students to assess the impact of PE/physical activity access as it relates to Wyoming childhood health, the health of the educational workforce and connections to incidence/prevalence of chronic disease. Efforts at LCCC are led by Cynthia Henning, Kinesiology and Health Promotion Program director, who has been collaborating with Kern to co-construct ways to include US-PEPAP in coursework at both UW and LCCC.

“The overall project is creating an interactive dashboard that can take all of the data Ben collected through surveying PE teachers across the country and make it more readable and accessible to those outside of the project. This means creating descriptive tables, comparative graphs and highlighting clear outliers so that people can use the data easier than what we have to work through right now,” says Meyers, from St. Paul, Minn., who is currently pursuing a certificate in public health. “I am focusing my thesis on a few of these outliers, currently analyzing how close the relationship is between teachers who follow a set curriculum and how they then assess students -- fitness-, curriculum- or standards-based, or no assessment at all. Hypothetically, if they follow a curriculum, they should have a clear method of testing for students, but we’re noticing this is not always the case. We hope to identify a few of these inconsistencies within PE standards across the country so we can unveil the lack of regularity and then help to create an equitable PE environment across the U.S.”

The dashboard will be capable of calculating statewide averages and downloads for selected variables, as well as allowing users to drill down to the school district level for complex analysis. The dashboard also will include links to state organizations that provide health information and services, as well as contact information for people who champion policy advocacy in each state. The Wyoming portion of the dashboard will include added features, such as links to organizations that specialize in Wyoming health promotion, including the departments of Health and Education, Cheyenne Regional Medical Center and various county public health services.

US-PEPAP will be the first interactive database of its kind to offer a large-scale national synopsis of student access to school PE and physical activity programming, providing researchers in public health and kinesiology the data they need to evaluate factors influencing childhood health -- and develop innovative means for improvement. It also will be a primary source for advocacy information to support future funding for health promotion projects in Wyoming and throughout the U.S.

About UW’s College of Health Sciences

UW’s College of Health Sciences trains health and wellness professionals and researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, including medicine, nursing, pharmacy, speech-language pathology, social work, kinesiology, public health, health administration and disability studies. The college also oversees residency and fellowship programs in Casper and Cheyenne, as well as operating a speech/hearing clinic in Laramie and primary care clinics in Laramie, Casper and Cheyenne.

With more than 1,600 undergraduate, graduate and professional students, the college is dedicated to training the health and wellness workforce of Wyoming and conducting high-quality research and community engagement, with a particular focus on rural and frontier populations.