Abstract
Schools and organized sports both offer great chances to promote physical activity among children. Full-day schools particularly allow for extensive participation in extra-curricular physical activities. However, due to time reasons, full-day schools may also prevent children from engagement in organized sports outside school. There is only little national and international research addressing the possible competition of full-day schools and providers of organized sports outside school and the potential effects on children's physical activity behavior. In Germany's educational system, a transformation towards more full-day schools is currently taking place. The existence of both, half-day and full-day schools, gave occasion to the following research question: Do students attending half-day and full-day school differ with respect to a) sports club membership rate and b) weekly amount of sports club training? Data were collected in eleven German primary schools. Selected schools offered both half-day and full-day (minimum three days/week with at least seven hours) care. 372 students' data (grades 1-4; N = 153 half-day, N = 219 full-day; 47.4% male, 8.8±1.2y) were eligible for analyses. We assessed sports club membership and weekly training duration via questionnaire. Statistical analyses included Chi-square and Mann-Whitney-U-Tests. 83% of half-day school students and 67% of full-day school students were sports club members (χ2(1) = 12.31, p<.001). Weekly duration of training in sports clubs among sports club members (N = 266) also differed between the groups (mdn = 150 min in half-day, mdn = 120 min in full-day school students; z = -2.37, p = .018). Additional analyses stratified for age and gender showed similar results. Primary school students attending full-day schools engage less in organized sports outside school than half-day school students, regardless of age and gender. Future studies should examine if the detected lower engagement in sports club physical activity is compensated by physical activities in other settings such as school or non-organized leisure time.
Highlights
Already in childhood, physical activity is a key factor for health [1, 2]
Due to the detected desiderata, this study aims to answer the following research question: Does habitual sports club participation differ between children attending half-day and full-day school with respect to a) sports club membership rate and b) weekly amount of sports club training?
We found that full-day school students were less engaged in sports clubs
Summary
Physical activity is a key factor for health [1, 2]. studies show that physical activity behavior adopted in early life most often tracks into adulthood [3, 4]. Recommendations for physical activity behavior and its promotion further point to different settings in which children’s physical activity should take place, i.e. in the family context, at school and in leisure time (organized sports and free play) [6]. In school, physical activity programs have the potential to reach all children regardless of their socioeconomic background. In most countries primary school schedules encompass four to five curriculum-based lessons but schedules differ in terms of organization: E.g. in France, Spain and England children generally spend the full day at school. Since 2003 optional full-day school offers were introduced and since have expanded continuously [8]. Numbers of students attending full-day school in Germany are continuously rising with less than 10% in 2002 and 42.5% in 2016 [9, 10]. A further expansion of full-day schools is claimed and subsidized until 2021 [11]
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