Overeating and Underachieving:
The Effects of Physical Fitness on the Academic Achievement
on Urban Students
An Action Research Project
Chevonne Byas
EDUC 7021 T
Fall 2010
Method
Participants
• The participants in this Action Research Project are 25 kindergarten
students in high functioning urban public school x.
• Participants are both male and female and range in age from 5 to 6 years of
age.
• 2 were identified as students with special needs
• classroom populations is racially diverse.
• The are 2 African American/Black students
• 3 Latino
• 16 Caucasian
• 2 Asian
• 1 South Asian students.
Experimental Design
 Pre-experimental design
 Symbolic design
 OXO
 One-Group Pre-test Post-test Design.
 pre-test (o)
 Variable (x)
 Post-test (o)
Threats to Validity:
 Internal threats
 History may be a threat to validity. A student may have test anxiety, they
may be distracted by a noise in the hall or they may be ill or otherwise
affected.
 Maturation may be threat to validity, as student may not understand the
importance of the assessment or my action research project and they may not
care to put effort into doing their best effort.
 Testing may be a threat to validity because
 Instrumentation, the results may be affected by the person proctoring the
Yopp Singer. This lends itself to being subjective.
 regression serves as a threat to validity.
 External threats
 Mortality, may be a threat if a student is absent when I am experimenting
or if they drop out during the length of the experiment. Statistical regression
should not be threat because my sample size is comparatively small.
Instruments

Consent forms
 Principal
 Teacher
 Parental

Survey

Pedometer

Assessment
 The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation has
proven to be a reliable measure of a student's
phonemic awareness ability.
 Used to determine reading and spelling
readiness.
 Measure a students' ability to orally segment
the phonemes in a word in their correct
order.
 This Assessment design
Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
Name
Student number
Date
Score (# correct)
 22 item test
 individually administered
 Approximately 5 minutes to complete
 Result analysis
Directions: Today we’re going to play a word game. I’m
going to say a word and I want you to break the word
apart. You are going to tell me each sound of the
word in order. For example, if I say old, you should
say /o/ /l/ /d/. Let’s try a few together.
Practice items: (assist in segmenting, if necessary)
ride (3) go (2)
man (3)
 All or mostly correct responses indicate
strong phonemic awareness
 Some correct responses indicate emerging
awareness
 little or few correct responses suggest
intervention needed to prevent reading
and spelling difficulty
(Yopp, 19995)
Instruments
Initial Survey (sample)
Student Name
Part 1: Demographic
Please circle the answer.
What are you?
Student Number
Boy
How old are you?
4
5
Part 2: Self Attitude
Please write 1, 2, 3 or 4.
I like it a lot
I like it
I don’t like it
I really don’t like it.
Do you like vegetables and fruit?
Do you like gym?
Part 3: Frequency
Please write the number of days, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7.
How many days a week do you go to gym?
How many days a week to you have recess?
How many days a week do you play outside?
girl
6
7
Proposed Data
Demographic Statistics
Race of Students
Race graph
 This chart shows the
racial breakdown of the
classroom
S
t
u
d
e
n
t
s
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Caucasion
African
American
Latino
Race
Asiain
South Asian
Proposed Data
Gender and age graph
Gender and Age
 Brakes down sex of class
 Shows the age of the students
A
g
e
Gender
Proposed data
Comparison graph
Comparison of pre
and post test scores.
25
20
When looking at the
post test and pre test
scores we see a
positive change in
most students
grades.
S
c 15
o
r
e 10
Pre test
Post test
5
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Student number
Proposed data
•Although activity improves
grades it is not the intensity
that effects the change.
•The rxy is -0.2336088
• no correlation
25
20
Raw score
15
Post score
Linear (Post score)
10
5
0
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
Steps Taken
5000
6000
7000