Part II: Summary and answer of research questions
The advantage of the author's approach is that she does not merely target 'childhood obesity' as a vague concept, but specifically targets one aspect of children's lifestyles today that has changed in the past and is a likely component of the obesity epidemic. She targets issues educators can have a concrete impact upon, such as PE classes and the ways children can commute to school.
The researcher surveyed the previous prevalence and decline of PE classes, the increase of sedentary leisure activities, and also the fears of parents that prevent children from commuting to school by foot or by bike. In the literature review, the author examines how minorities, because of fears of community safety and budgetary cuts in PE programs, have been disproportionately hit by the obesity crisis. The harm done to minorities is not simply physical. In one study she cites that physically fit children perform better on cognitive tests as well tests of health, which suggest the disparities in access to school physical fitness programs has hidden societal and personal costs to unfit children.
Her research begins with a physiological study of childhood needs for activity, and then examines feasible policy goals and benchmarks to set. Specifically, modifying school PE is essential so that activity is increased to increase resting heart rate, rather than just assume that activity comes from providing the class. The "most promising evidence for intervening in the area of physical education is a recent report demonstrating...
One controlled study found that a "mere 1-hour increase in physical education per week resulted in a 31% drop in BMI among overweight and at-risk girls in first grade (Mejia 2005:5) Also of importance is the finding of a broader study that "modifying the PE curriculum is universally effective-across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status, with girls and boys, and in urban as well as rural settings" (Mejia 2005: 9).
The author uses existing literature to make a convincing case for the need and efficacy of increased PE education, provided it is done in a way that all children, even the unfit feel included, and children keep moving throughout the period. (Sports involving continuous movement like soccer, for example, are more effective than baseball, given the relatively short span of time allocated to school periods). She makes effective use of the process of identifying research problems that are feasible for examination by using concrete, measurable tools to evaluate physical health, like children's BMI index. A functional research question and hypothesis must focus on measurable results, and the stress upon physical measures of childhood health is necessary to demonstrate the relevance of the research and the accuracy of the conclusions. Thus the overall function or purpose of this literature review is to justify the need and the value of research into expanded PE programs, to show that PE programs are lacking overall in America -- and above all, to explain what…
