Physical Education Resources

Status of Physical Education in the United States

The Community Guide strongly recommends school-based physical education as a strategy to promote physical activity among youth. Unfortunately, several claims regarding the decline in physical education exposure among U.S. students have been made in the past decade. However, few large-scale studies have examined such changes.

At the request of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sport, and Nutrition, the National Physical Activity Plan Alliance (NPAPA) was tasked with reviewing the available evidence regarding changes in exposure to school-based physical education among U.S. students. The primary objective of this effort was to better understand physical education exposure over time to inform national recommendations and strategies for physical education.

Specifically, the NPAPA was charged with:
  • identifying the best existing surveys or studies with measures of physical education exposure,
  • identifying and developing measures from these existing surveys or studies to assess physical education exposure over time, and
  • drawing conclusions based on the best available evidence.
Physical Education Resources from the NPAPA

Three resources were developed to present the findings of this work:

Secular Changes in Physical Education Attendance Among U.S. High School Students, YRBS 1991-2013

The purpose of the Secular Changes in Physical Education Attendance Among U.S. High School Students, YRBS 1991-2013 report was to examine secular changes in physical education attendance among U.S. high school students over the past two decades.

Key findings:

  • One-half of US high school students do not attend physical education classes — which is consistent over the 22-year period studied.
  • Daily physical education attendance dropped 16.2% in four years (from 41.6% in 1991 to 25.4% in 1995) — attendance rates have stabilized since then.
  • Attendance in physical education classes decreases steadily as a student moves from 9th to 12th grade.
  • Consistently, more boys than girls reported attending physical education over the 22-year period studied.
  • The report concludes that policies and programs should be adopted that prioritize physical education in order to maximize its benefits.
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