Practical and Ethical Considerations for Schools Using Social Media to Promote Physical Literacy in Youth

Fostering Digital Life Skills Through Social Media With Adolescents in 6 German States: Protocol for an Accessibility Study According to the RE-AIM Framework

BACKGROUND

Social media is essential in the lives of adolescents, with 97% of US teenagers engaging daily. While it facilitates communication, learning, and identity development, it also poses risks like harmful content exposure and psychological distress, particularly for adolescents in their critical developmental stage. Teaching digital life skills innovatively counters these risks, adapting traditional competencies such as decision-making, problem-solving, creative and critical thinking, communication, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, empathy, and emotional and stress management to digital challenges.

OBJECTIVE

This study evaluates the accessibility of the "leduin" program, a novel intervention designed to impart digital life skills through Instagram. The program aims to leverage social media's educational potential, focusing on effective strategies to engage adolescents. Emphasizing accessibility is crucial, as it determines the program's overall impact.

METHODS

The leduin program, developed through intervention mapping, applies behavior change techniques via social media for 9th and 10th graders. It is a 14-week spaced learning curriculum with daily sessions <5 minutes. Emphasizing the "reach" aspect of the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance (RE-AIM) model, the recruitment targets diverse educational settings across 6 German states, aiming for inclusivity. Recruitment will involve schools, youth centers, and therapeutic facilities. The study seeks at least 128 participants, a calculated minimum to detect medium-sized effects in the quasi-experimental design and explore varying engagement levels and program responses. Data collection includes preintervention, postintervention, and 6-month follow-up surveys, using multilevel regression, latent growth models, and qualitative analysis to extensively assess reach and gain first insights on effectiveness, acceptance, implementation, and maintenance. The study aims to reveal key factors influencing program participation and interaction; a detailed analysis of engagement patterns will reveal the effectiveness of the recruitment strategies and barriers to participation. Additionally, initial indications of the program's impact on life skills, social media-related skills, health status, risk behaviors, and academic performance will be analyzed.

RESULTS

Recruitment was planned from May 2023 until the beginning of the leduin program in October 2023. As of March 2024, we have recruited 283 participants.

CONCLUSIONS

The leduin program stands as an innovative and essential initiative in adolescent health promotion, harnessing the power of social media to teach important digital life skills. This study highlights the critical role of accessibility in the success of social media interventions. Effective adolescent engagement strategies are imperative, as they dictate the overall impact of such interventions. The insights gained from this study will be instrumental in shaping future programs, laying groundwork for a subsequent, more comprehensive cluster-randomized controlled trial. The study's design acknowledges the limitations of the current quasi-experimental approach, including the anticipated sample size and the absence of a control group, and aims to provide a foundational understanding for future research in this field.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien DRKS00032308; https://drks.de/search/de/trial/DRKS00032308.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

PRR1-10.2196/51085.

News of the Pedagogical Models in Physical Education-A Quick Review

In the last two decades, research has proliferated in the field of pedagogical models used in school Physical Education. The growth is so high that it is necessary to do a quick review to know which models currently exist and which are emerging. The objective of this work is to collect all the models or pedagogical approaches present in the scientific literature related to school Physical Education and to make known, to the scientific and academic community, its main purposes and characteristics. A quick review of the literature found in the Web of Science and Scopus databases has been carried out using "pedagogical model" and "Physical Education" as descriptors. The results revealed a total of 19 pedagogical approaches that record scientific evidence linked to their application in the classroom. It was detected that some models or approaches were more scientifically supported than others, as is the case for Cooperative Learning, Sports Education, or Teaching Games for Understanding, while others barely registered in international scientific literature. It was concluded that researchers need to work together with Physical Education teachers to analyze the effectiveness of all these approaches. School teachers are also encouraged to vary their pedagogical approach depending on the content they are working on and the positive effects they are looking for in the psychic, motor, affective-emotional, and social domains of the students. Finally, it is proposed to researchers who promote new models or approaches a greater clarity of these to facilitate their application in the field of school Physical Education, since some difficulty has been detected in the practical application of some approaches.

Effect of motor skills development on psychological and social traits of students of mazandaran province during the covid-19 pandemics

Nowadays, the covid 19 pandemics are challenging all students. The present study aimed to investigate whether motor skill development affects students' psychological and social traits during the covid 19 pandemics. The present study's population consisted of all students aged 9-17 years in the three grades of the elementary, middle, and high school in Mazandaran province in the academic year 2020-2021, which corresponded to approximately 534 thousand students. We used a simple random sampling to determine the sample size because Iranian schools were closed. In this study, we selected 15 individuals for each of the experimental and control groups. Due to some students dropping out or leaving the practice, the samples comprised 42 girls and 45 boys in the control group and 41 girls and 43 boys in the experimental group. To collect data, we used the Standard Student Social Skills Questionnaire by Garsham and Elliott (1990), Cooper-Smith Self-Esteem Questionnaire, and Children's Depression Scale Short Form (CDS-A). We conducted the experimental group for 36 sessions, i.e., three months and three sessions per week, and each session lasted 30-45 min, depending on the quarantine conditions on the 19th day. To analyze the data, we used a two-way analysis of variance and the Scheffe post hoc test. The results showed that all groups had lower scores in psychological traits than those in the pretest. However, no significant difference was found between groups (P. < 0.05), and this effect was not significant in social traits (05/0 < P.). We also suggest that school principals and health care professionals use this study to design guidelines for creating a healthy environment and developing health-oriented educational programs to improve students' quality of life and health.

Virtual Reality in Health Science Education: Professors’ Perceptions

Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience in a three-dimensional (3D) computer-simulated world. Recent advances in technology position VR as a multipurpose technology in the healthcare sector and as a critical component in achieving Health 4.0. In this article, descriptive and correlationally quantitative research is carried out on the assessments made by Latin American health sciences university professors on the didactic use of virtual reality technologies. The main objective was to analyze the differences in the perceptions expressed by the public or private tenure of the universities where the professors teach. In addition, gender and age gaps were identified in the assessments obtained from each of the types of universities. The results reveal that Latin American health science professors at private universities have a higher selfconcept of their digital skills for the use of virtual reality in the lectures. This greater selfconcept also leads to a reduction in the gender and age gaps in the participating private universities with respect to the public counterparts. It is advisable to increase both faculty training in the didactic use of virtual reality and funding for its use, mainly in public universities.

The Role of Physical Education and Sports in Modern Society Supported by IoT—A Student Perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic in recent years and the massive presence of information technology generate one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, namely the technological challenge. In this context, educational technologies have a positive impact on the correct and effective teaching and learning of physical education and sports (PES), with a great positive impact on future sustainable higher education (HE). Thus, various innovative techniques could be of interest, such as the use of social networks and fitness sites, e-learning platforms, computer games, and telephone applications involving video analysis and age-specific images of students and the skills taught. This study aims to establish the main means used by technology, through which it can improve the teaching, learning, and practice of PES. This paper demonstrates the positive effects of technology on the PES field in modern society through a regression model, applied to data collected from 260 students from 2 Romanian PES Universities. The pedagogical and educational elements of our model also highlight the role of technology as a facilitator of knowledge, functioning as a tool that comes to the aid of specialists in the PES field.

Exploring the adoption of social media in self-paced physical activity in early childhood education: a case in central China

Social media web 2.0 technologies can be adopted as an inclusive method to assist children in enhancing their quality of education for the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g. SDGs 4 and 17). Social media technologies have been documented as low-cost, synchronous, and convenient methods to assist young children, parents, and early childhood (EC) teachers in communication and collaboration. However, few researchers have explored the potential usage of social media tools in enhancing children's physical activities in the early years, particularly during the pandemic period. This article uses the example of WeChat Sports, one of the most famous children's games supported by social media web 2.0, to explore the benefits, challenges, and potentialities of using them in ECE. This research uses semi-structured interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the attitudes and perspectives of EC teachers and parents on the potential usage of social media technologies in supporting children's physical activities. The results reveal that most participants had a good understanding of using scientific methods to assist children's physical development, however, they expressed concerns on children's health, privacy, and formal learning in terms of overexposure to social media technologies. Suggestions and implications are also provided for both social media application developers and educators in future research studies.

General population's knowledge about the anatomical locations of organs and medical terms today and 50 years ago: a replication study

Background: Physicians are frequently not aware that patients may not be familiar with the meaning of medical terms or have limited knowledge about the location of organs. These aspects of functional health competence require particular attention when designing communication curricula for undergraduate medical students. The aim of our study was to evaluate the knowledge of laypersons about the anatomical locations of organs and the definitions of commonly used medical terms as relevant aspects of health literacy. Furthermore, we wished to compare it with the knowledge of a historical patient cohort who performed this study 50 years ago. Methods: In this replication study, multiple-choice questionnaires with simple anatomy and common medical terms which were published in 1970 were distributed among a convenience sample of lay volunteers (n=537) from the streets of Hamburg, Germany. Sociodemographic data including sex, age, highest educational school achievement, occupation in a field associated with medicine, and German as first language were also collected. The percentage of laypersons' correct answers was compared to the percentage of correct answers of a historical patient cohort (n=234) published in 1970 to identify the development of health literacy as basis for curricular planning. Results: Laypersons showed significantly more correct answers in four of eight simple anatomical locations of organs (p<0.001). For seven commonly used medical terms laypersons only gave significantly more correct answers for the definitions of "jaundice" (p<0.001) and "diarrhoea" (p=0.001) compared to the historical cohort from 1970. Participants with a senior high school degree performed significantly better with respect to total scores of correct organ locations (p<0.001, d=0.35) and correct definitions of medical terms (p=0.001, d=0.30) than participants who completed junior high school. Conclusion: The definitions of common medical terms and the correct anatomical locations of organs by laypersons have increased during the past 50 years but could still need improvement by school education and media information of better quality. Medical educators should know about the low health literacy of laypersons with respect to these aspects to raise medical students' awareness for this problem and to provide communication training for medical students to use comprehensible language during history taking and shared decision making.

Social Media and Health Promotion

With over 3 billion users worldwide, social media has become a staple of daily life for people across the globe [...].