Enhancing Upper Secondary Students’ Situational Engagement and Cognitive Prerequisites of Learning Through the Physically Active Academic Lessons Intervention: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Cluster Randomized Individual Crossover Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Internationally, physical activity is successfully integrated into academic lessons in primary schools, showing promising results on cognition and student engagement. However, there is a lack of knowledge about its effects and feasibility for individual situated learning processes in upper secondary school. Objective: This protocol describes the design and methods of the Physically Active Academic Lessons (PAAL) study, a mixed methods, cluster randomized, individual crossover trial. The PAAL study aims to examine the acute effects of physically active academic lessons on cognitive prerequisites of learning (alertness and executive functions) and situational engagement (behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement; disaffection; competence experiences; and help seeking), as well as factors modifying these effects (physical and mental load and perceived physical and academic competence). Further, subject teachers' and students' experiences and perceptions of physically active academic lessons in general upper secondary school will be explored. Methods: The first part of the PAAL study involves exploring subject teachers' experiences of facilitators, barriers, usefulness, and the meaning of physically active academic lessons for the situational learning process through semistructured interviews with 14 teachers. The second part consists of a cluster‑randomized individual crossover trial including 168 students in mathematics and foreign language lessons, followed by interviews with 30 students. Results: Funding for the study was obtained in May 2023. Ethical approval for the teacher interviews was granted in September 2023, and for the student trial in December 2023. Data collection was completed between October 2023 and November 2024. Data analysis is ongoing. The findings of the study will provide essential evidence-based information on physically active classroom practices that support teachers and schools in implementing pedagogical methods that enhance student learning and well-being in upper secondary schools. Conclusions: The background, design, content of the intervention, and methods of the PAAL study are presented. This study aims to address a gap in the literature regarding the feasibility and effectiveness of physically active methods during academic lessons in upper secondary school.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.061 | 0.012 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".