Growing Pains? Examining Developmental Claims of Preschooler Sport Programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, there has been growing concern regarding very young children’s health and physical activity (PA) levels. Paradoxically, trends suggest an increase in sport participation among this age group; however, limited evidence suggests organized sport is an optimal context for preschoolers to engage in PA. This study examined preschooler sport programs’ claims of developmental outcomes, through the content of programs’ websites. Our search yielded 114 websites of preschooler sport programs in the Toronto area, across six sports. The quantitative content analysis revealed programs claimed a mean of 9.63 developmental outcomes each, with much variation by sport type. Approximately half (47.3%) of all developmental claims focused on physical development, followed by psychological/emotional development (21.8%), social development (11.9%), general development (11.9%), and intellectual development (7.1%). Findings are discussed in relation to existing child development and youth sport literature, practical implications, and extensive future research areas. Resume Recemment, la sante et la pratique d’activite physique des tres jeunes enfants sont devenues sources de preoccupation. De facon paradoxale, la participation sportive de ce groupe d’âge est en augmentation. Cependant peu de resultats de recherche suggerent que le sport organise est un contexte favorable a la pratique d’activite physique pour ce groupe d’âge. Cette etude analyse les objectifs de developpement vises par des programmes de sport organise chez les enfants d’âge pre-scolaire tels que presentes dans le contenu des sites web de ces organisations. Nous avons trouve 114 sites webs de programmes sportifs pour ces enfants dans six sports dans la region de Toronto. L’analyse de contenu quantitative revele que ces programmes affirment viser en moyenne 9,63 objectifs de developpement chacun, avec une grande variation selon le sport. Environ la moitie (47,3%) de ces objectifs vises portent sur le developpement physique, 21,8% portent sur le developpement psychologique / emotionnel, 11,9% portent sur le developpement social, 11,9% sur le developpement general et 7,1% sur le developpement intellectuel. Ces resultats sont discutes en relation avec la litterature sur le developpement de l’enfant, le sport chez les jeunes, les implications pratiques et de futures recherches.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".