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Dosage and duration:
Maximum benefit for school-aged chil-
dren and adolescents comes from group-based activity for at least 
60 minutes per day that allows for increased mastery and skill level 
over time. 
4. 
Fun: 
Create early positive experiences that keep students coming 
back for more, and let them have a say in what “fun” actually is.
5. 
Incentives and motivation:
Focus on the “personal best” versus 
winning or losing.
6. 
Feedback to kids:
Successful programs build group and individual 
goal setting and feedback into programs. 
7. 
Teaching, coaching, and mentorship:
Teachers of physical 
education, coaches, and mentors can make or break the experience 
for students. They should be prepared through proper training and 
included in stakeholder conversations. A well-trained physical activity 
workforce shares a common commitment and principles that promote 
physical activity among children. Great leaders create positive experi-
ences and influence all learners. 
SOURCE: Excerpted from Nike, 2012.

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Educating the Student Body: Taking Physical Activity and Physical Education to School
Approaches to Physical Education in Schools
 
221
anced with appropriate attention to skill development and to national 
education standards for quality physical education (see Box 5-6). In a 
recent literature review, Bassett and colleagues (2013) found that physical 
education contributes to children achieving an average of 23 minutes of 
vigorous- or moderate-intensity physical activity daily. However, the time 
spent in vigorous- or moderate-intensity physical activity could be increased 
by 6 minutes if the physical education curriculum were to incorporate a 
standardized curriculum such as SPARK (discussed in detail below) (Bassett 
et al., 2013). Thus, it is possible for physical education to contribute to 
youth meeting at least half (30 minutes) of their daily requirement for vig-
orous- or moderate-intensity physical activity. To help children grow holis-
tically, however, physical education needs to achieve other learning goals 
when children are active. To this end, physical education programs must 
possess the quality characteristics specified by NASPE (2007b, 2009b,c) 
(see Box 5-6). Designing and implementing a physical education program 
with these characteristics in mind should ensure that the time and curricular 
materials of the program enable students to achieve the goals of becoming 
knowledgeable exercisers and skillful movers who value and adopt a physi-
cally active, healthy lifestyle.
Findings from research on effective physical education support these 
characteristics as the benchmarks for quality programs. In an attempt to 
understand what effective physical education looks like, Castelli and Rink 
(2003) conducted a mixed-methods comparison of 62 physical education 
programs in which a high percentage of students achieved the state physical 
education learning standards with programs whose students did not achieve 
the standards. Comprehensive data derived from student performance, 
teacher surveys, and onsite observations demonstrated that highly effec-
tive physical education programs were housed in cohesive, long-standing 
departments that experienced more facilitators (e.g., positive policy, sup-
portive administration) than inhibitors (e.g., marginalized status as a sub-
ject matter within the school). Further, effective programs made curricular 
changes prior to the enactment of state-level policy, while ineffective pro-
grams waited to make changes until they were told to do so. The teachers in 
ineffective programs had misconceptions about student performance and, 
in general, lower expectations of student performance and behavior.