Exergames on situational interest and physical activity in high school students: a pilot program in Physical Education
Résumé
Introduction: Less than half of French people over 15 meet the recommendations of the World Health Organization in terms of physical activity (PA). Exergames (digital games involving whole body movements) could be introduced in Physical Education (PE) to arouse students' interest and increase their PA (Trout & Christie, 2007). Situational Interest (SI) is an individual's form of intrinsic and ephemeral motivation for an activity or content (Chen & Darst, 2001). However, the issue of maintaining IS, beyond a discovery phase of a novel activity, has been little addressed until now (Roure et Pasco, 2017). The objective of this pilot study was to design a PE program based on exergames in order to maintain SI and moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) in high school students throughout the five weeks of program implementation. Method: 45 students from two high schools in Brest (France) took part in this program during their PE lessons. This five-week pilot program was developed by a research team, based on three different exergames. This program's design was based on the different dimensions of SI that were supposed to sustain motivation and PA over time. Repeated measures were performed during PE lessons. Accelerometers were used to record PA intensity during each session. SI 19 items questionnaire (Roure et al., 2016) was used to collect SI on lesson 1 and 3. Results: The program had negative effects on students' SI and positive effects on their PA displayed during the lessons. MVPA increase between first lesson (M=39.326; SD=9.259) and second lesson (M=44.683; SD=11.479; t(23)=-3.678, p<.01) and decrease between second and fourth lesson (M=39,497; SD=11,763; t(20)=2.155; p<.05). Moreover, the overall decreasing is not significant and the percentage of time spent in MVPA is 39.56% in 4 lessons. SI decrease from lesson 1 (M=16.379; SD=3.401) to 3 (M=14.550; SD=5.559) t(26)=3.229, p<.01). SI average obtained over all sessions is 16.47 (min 5, max 25). Discussion: These results partly agree with those of Sun et al. (2013) which conclude that PA increases, but SI decreases over the course of an exergames program in PE. First, 39.56% MVPA is very positive, compared to a study of 232 middle school students reporting an average of 25% MVPA in conventional EP (Brusseau & Burns, 2015). SI average over all sessions is also a positive result compared to SI measure in conventional PE carried out on 422 students in France, with an average score of 14.1 (Allard-Latour et al., submitted). Conclusion: This 5-week program, based on exergames, appears to be beneficial for SI and effective PA compared to conventional PE. It offers a favourable prospect for the promotion of PA to a type of public that is little involved in practicing PE outside the school setting, thanks to its design oriented towards increasing the SI. However, it remains to test the hypothesis of the transformation of IS into a more stable "individual interest" in PA on programs of a longer duration.