Abstract
Many studies reported a positive relationship between motor skills, cognitive functions, and school performance in school-age children; however, little is known in preschool children. The aim of the present study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of a physical education program (PEP) on locomotor, object control skills, and pre-literacy cognitive functions in a wide population of preschoolers and verify whether weight status could influence these abilities. In the context of the Training-to-Health Project, a sample of 1,029 preschoolers was recruited in kindergartens from the urban area of Palermo (Italy). Their gross motor and pre-literacy skills were tested before (PRE) and after (POST) following 16 weeks (2 h/week) of a PEP, which included ludic-motor activities aimed at developing body awareness and fundamental motor and perceptual-sensory skills. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) were performed to assess the skills before and after the intervention and to evaluate the effect of different categories of weight status on the examined variables. Regression analyses were conducted to confirm the hypothesized interrelationship between motor and pre-literacy skills in the considered sample. Both locomotor/object control and pre-literacy skills were significantly higher in children after the PEP (p < 0.05). We found 23% of overweight children and no significant difference between weight status classes in both PRE and POST PEP groups. In the POST group, higher locomotor and object control skills were mostly associated with better pre-literacy skills. This study shows that PEP was effective in improving both motor and pre-literacy skills in preschoolers independently from age and gender, while weight status did not affect these skills suggesting that this program can be administrated indifferently in children with different categories of weight status. Therefore, PEP could be a decisive education strategy to enhance motor and cognitive learning in preschool children and to achieve successful academic outcomes.
Highlights
Motor SkillsFundamental movement skills (FMS), or motor skills, are defined as the basic level of movement and include locomotor skills and object control (Bellows et al, 2017; Han et al, 2018)
With regard to the pre-literacy skills, all of them significantly increased in the POST physical education program (PEP) group, meaning that both errors and time needed to perform the test were significantly lower in this group compared to the pre-literacy skills were tested before (PRE) group (Table 3)
The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of a physical education program (PEP) on motor and cognitive skills in a large preschooler sample focusing on the influence of children’s weight status
Summary
Motor SkillsFundamental movement skills (FMS), or motor skills, are defined as the basic level of movement and include locomotor skills (running, jumping, galloping, hopping, crawling) and object control (bouncing, catching, throwing, kicking) (Bellows et al, 2017; Han et al, 2018). Several studies reported that the practice of physical activity (PA) improves FMS level by inducing a higher MC in childhood (Fisher et al, 2005; Hardy et al, 2010; Battaglia et al, 2018; Aivazidis et al, 2019; Nilsen et al, 2020a) For these reasons, the practice of structured PA in kindergarten during this period results to be crucial (Deli et al, 2006; Barbosa et al, 2016; Figueroa and An, 2017; Kippe and Lagestad, 2018; Alves and Alves, 2019; Jarraya et al, 2019). The latter topic is confirmed by the fact that over the years several research groups have focused on the importance of PA in children and adolescents, and the few articles present in the literature about this issue in preschooler demonstrate the recent interest among scientists (Van Capelle et al, 2017; Engel et al, 2018)
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