An investigation of the effects of portable play equipment to increase physical activity levels of preschool children

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a portable play equipment intervention intended to increase the PA levels of preschool children during outdoor classroom time. The following hypotheses were formulated: (a) the intervention using portable play equipment will increase the PA of all children during their outdoor classroom period as measured by pedometer steps. (b) boys will be more physically active as measured by pedometer steps than girls during the preschool outdoor classroom period. The research questions addressed in the study were: (a) what types of activities do preschool children participate in during their outdoor classroom period? (b) what type of portable play equipment is used most often by preschool children during their outdoor classroom period? and (c) is there a difference in the activities and equipment participated in between preschool boys and girls during their outdoor classroom period?;An ABAB reversal design was used to study the physical activity measured by pedometers (Yamax New Lifestyles Digi-Walker(TM) SW -- 701) in preschool children when the portable play equipment was introduced to the outside classroom. The first intervention phase was using portable play equipment and the second intervention phase used a teacher to encourage active play for four randomly selected children. A modified version of the Observational System for Recording Physical Activity in Children-Preschool Version (OSRAC-P) (Brown et al., 2006) was used to code the activities and the intensity of the PA the children did during outside classroom time. A repeated-measure by time analysis was completed to see the differences between baseline phase and intervention phase data. The same analysis was done to see the differences between the teacher intervention phase and baseline phase. The significance level was set to p ≤ 0.05.;The PA change between the first baseline and the first intervention was statistically significant. The PA levels significantly increased when the portable equipment was introduced the first time to the outside classroom time. However, the change between the second baseline and the second intervention was not statistically significant. Finally the teacher intervention for the four randomly selected students was not statistically significant either.;The results of the study do not support the first hypothesis even though there were statistical differences between the first baseline and the first intervention. The intervention using portable play equipment did not increase PA of all children during their outdoor classroom period as measured by pedometer steps. The second hypothesis is not supported by this study. Boys were not more physically active than girls as measured by pedometer steps. The amount of steps for boys and girls were similar throughout the study. The results indicate that portable play equipment with teacher encouragement has the potential to increase the physical activity levels of preschool children but more research is necessary to understand the complexity of behavior of this age group.