Identifying and Motivating students who mostly need Physical ACTivity through Physical Education: Launching the European "IMPACT-PE" project

A large number of students do not meet World Health Organization’s recommendations for daily Physical Activity (PA), while most schools in Europe do not provide opportunities for 60 minutes daily PA. Physical Education (PE)... [ view full abstract ]

A large number of students do not meet World Health Organization’s recommendations for daily Physical Activity (PA), while most schools in Europe do not provide opportunities for 60 minutes daily PA. Physical Education (PE) is the only setting where inactive students can be identified and encouraged to adopt regular PA. In this symposium we present the IMPACT-PE project which is supported by the European Commission Erasmus+ Sport program. The project has four major aims: (1) providing tools for PE teachers and policy makers to facilitate the identification of inactive students within PE classes, as well as low levels of PA across schools (a monitoring system); (2) providing guidelines and educational material to assist PE teachers in motivating these students to become regularly physically active; (3) creating a European network of PE teachers with expertise in PA promotion who will collaborate with researchers and policy makers to promote PA through PE; and (4) investigating the effectiveness of these outputs with regard to the promotion of students’ PA and well-being. In this symposium presenters address each of these topics and the respective strategies adopted to achieve the goals of the project. They represent a consortium of six universities, four educational authorities and three PE teacher associations including the European Association of Physical Education. The tools and educational material are going to be developed in seven European languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Turkish) and will be Open Access to all. Researchers interested in the IMPACT-PE project and its aims are invited to collaborate with the current project team and discuss ideas for future actions in this area.