A decade of impact: sustainability and effectiveness of 10 years continuous delivery of a motor competence program in a girls’ secondary school
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Motor competence (MC), an umbrella term for movement skills, motor coordination, and/or stability, is an important contributor to child health and development. Despite its importance, MC levels among children are low, and declining. Further, girls often display lower levels of MC, particularly object control skills, compared to boys. Interventions targeting girls’ MC are critical, and implementation sustainability is crucial for the long-term success of interventions. Yet there is a lack of literature on the sustainability of MC programs in real-world settings. The aim of this current study was to investigate the sustainability and effectiveness of 10 years continuous delivery of a MC program in an Australian girls’ secondary school. Specifically, this study aimed to (i) investigate the impact of the program on girls’ MC, each year, and trends over time and (ii) explore reasons for long-term program sustainability from the perspectives of school leaders and teachers.Method A convergent mixed-methods design was employed. MC data were collected annually from Year 7 girls (aged 12–13) from 2015 to 2024 using the Canadian Agility and Movement Skill Assessment, pre and post semester-long (approximately 22 weeks) program. Outcomes were analyzed using general linear models with repeated measures to assess pre- and post-program changes, and cohort-based comparisons over 10 years, incorporating both linear and quadratic models to identify the best fit. In 2024, online in-depth one-on-one interviews with school leaders and teachers (n = 7) explored perceptions of the program's sustainability and its ongoing impact on student, teacher, and school level factors. An inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis was used to analyze the interviews.Results Valid pre- and post-program data were collected from 868 students, with annual cohort sizes ranging from 73 to 100 students. All students were female and aged between 12 and 13 years. General linear modeling indicated significant improvement in MC, with Year 7 girls showing a large effect from pre- (M = 18.20, SD = 3.82) to post-program (M = 21.92, SD = 3.23), F(1) = 1380, p < .001, η2 = .617. A quadratic relationship was found between lower starting values and greater improvements (p < .001, R2 = .350). Interviews illuminated the ongoing impact of the program on student's MC, particularly those with lower MC. Factors such as strong leadership support, school champion, stakeholder engagement, and data-driven insights influenced sustainability. Convergent interpretations revealed two key findings: improved outcomes for all and the greatest outcomes for the most in need.Conclusion This study demonstrates the sustained effectiveness of the program, particularly for Year 7 girls with lower MC. The program's success was supported by its adaptability, data-driven approach, strong leadership, and active teacher involvement, which facilitated its integration into the school. The findings emphasize the importance of aligning the program with the school's core values to secure ongoing leadership support, teacher commitment, and student engagement, ensuring its long-term sustainability.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".