Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: The Impact of Physical Activity and Sports on Health, Social-Emotional, and Academic Outcomes

(Education)

Schools provide a platform for interventions aimed at improving health and well-being in addition to developing human capital.  At the same time, opportunities for physical activity and extracurricular activities outside of school hours may be an important input for academic achievement.  In this panel, we examine whether physical activity and sports participation may be important school inputs or interventions that impact students’ health, social-emotional well-being, and academic achievement.  The session will provide evidence on when and how physical activity may provide benefits in these domains.  For instance, benefits to physical activity may depend on time spent on the activity, whether physical activity occurs in school, and the potential alternative activities children pursue.  Benefits to sports participation may also extend beyond benefits induced by increased physical activity.

Many earlier studies on these topics have had difficulty separating potential treatment effects from selection effects.  The papers in this session address this limitation in the existing literature using econometric methods or random assignment to treatment to estimate plausible causal effects.

The first paper provides the first post-NCLB era estimates of PE effects on child body weight and academic achievement using data from Early Child Longitudinal Survey Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (ECLS-K: 2011).  The authors instrument for weekly time spent in PE using state PE regulations.  Although weekly average PE time is higher than earlier pre-NCLB research, the authors find no effect of PE on average BMI or academic performance in kindergarten through third grades.  However, they find evidence that increased time in physical education is associated with a higher likelihood of obesity and overweight among kindergarten girls. The authors hypothesize that this result- could be due to PE substituting for other forms of physical activity.

A second paper examines the effects of sports participation (and physical activity) in high school on in-school victimization or bulling.  The authors instrument for sports participation using state-level participation rates and examine the effects of sports participation using data from both the Youth Risk behavioral Survey (YRBS) and Panel Study of Income Dynamics – Childhood Development Supplement (PSID-CDS).  They find that sports and physical activities reduce bullying, with effects ranging from -1 to -20 percentage points.

A third paper provides experimental evidence on the effects of participation in a sports-based positive youth development program that meets 3 times a week for 20 weeks at 19 low-income Chicago Public Schools in the study. The authors randomized 530 interested new participants in 2^nd-4^th grades to their school’s soccer team or waitlist.  The authors will share findings on the effects of participation on BMI percentile.

One discussant has expertise in childhood obesity and health.  Another discussant has expertise on the role of sports and out-of-class time activities on educational outcomes.  The discussants’ backgrounds will allow for productive feedback and differing perspectives of the contributions of the three papers and body of evidence as a whole.  Both discussants also are well-versed in the methodology used in these papers.