Overeating and Underachieving:

1. Overeating and Underachieving: The Effects of Physical Fitness on the Academic Achievement on Urban Students An Action Research Project Chevonne Byas EDUC 7021 T Fall 2010

2. Method Participants • The participants in this Action Research Project are 25 kindergarten students in high functioning urban public school x. • Participants are both male and female and range in age from 5 to 6 years of age. • 2 were identified as students with special needs • classroom populations is racially diverse. • The are 2 African American/Black students • 3 Latino • 16 Caucasian • 2 Asian • 1 South Asian students.

3. Experimental Design • Pre-experimental design • Symbolic design • OXO • One-Group Pre-test Post-test Design. • pre-test (o) • Variable (x) • Post-test (o)

4. Threats to Validity: • Internal threats • History may be a threat to validity. A student may have test anxiety, they may be distracted by a noise in the hall or they may be ill or otherwise affected. • Maturation may be threat to validity, as student may not understand the importance of the assessment or my action research project and they may not care to put effort into doing their best effort.   • Testing may be a threat to validity because • Instrumentation, the results may be affected by the person proctoring the Yopp Singer. This lends itself to being subjective. • regression serves as a threat to validity.   • External threats • Mortality, may be a threat if a student is absent when I am experimenting or if they drop out during the length of the experiment. Statistical regression should not be threat because my sample size is comparatively small.

5. Instruments • Consent forms • Principal • Teacher • Parental • Survey • Pedometer • Assessment Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation Name Student number   Date Score (# correct) Directions: Today we’re going to play a word game. I’m going to say a word and I want you to break the word apart. You are going to tell me each sound of the word in order. For example, if I say old, you should say /o/ /l/ /d/. Let’s try a few together. Practice items: (assist in segmenting, if necessary) ride (3) go (2) man (3) • The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation has proven to be a reliable measure of a student's phonemic awareness ability. • Used to determine reading and spelling readiness. • Measure a students' ability to orally segment the phonemes in a word in their correct order. • This Assessment design • 22 item test • individually administered • Approximately 5 minutes  to complete • Result analysis • All or mostly correct responses indicate strong phonemic awareness • Some correct responses indicate emerging awareness • little or few correct responses suggest intervention needed to prevent reading and spelling difficulty    (Yopp, 19995)

6. Instruments Initial Survey (sample) Student Name Student Number Part 1: Demographic Please circle the answer. What are you? Boy girl How old are you? 4 5 6 7  Part 2: Self Attitude Please write 1, 2, 3 or 4. I like it a lot I like it I don’t like it I really don’t like it. Do you like vegetables and fruit? Do you like gym? Part 3: Frequency Please write the number of days, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. How many days a week do you go to gym? How many days a week to you have recess? How many days a week do you play outside?

7. Proposed Data Demographic Statistics Race graph This chart shows the racial breakdown of the classroom

8. Proposed Data Gender and Age Gender and age graph Brakes down sex of class Shows the age of the students Age Gender

9. Proposed data Comparison graph Comparison of pre and post test scores. When looking at the post test and pre test scores we see a positive change in most students grades. Score Student number

10. Proposed data Although activity improves grades it is not the intensity that effects the change. The rxy is -0.2336088 no correlation