Assessing Impact of Active Learning on Student Outcomes: Texas Initiatives for Children's Activity and Nutrition (ICAN)

The University of Texas System (UT)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Physical Activity

Treatments: Behavioral: Texas I-CAN!

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03087279

1R01HD070741

Details and patient eligibility

About

Background: Active learning is designed to pair physical activity with the teaching of academic content. This has been shown to be a successful strategy to increase physical activity and improve academic performance. The existing designs have confounded academic lessons with physical activity. As a result, it is impossible to determine if the subsequent improvement in academic performance is due to: (1) physical activity, (2) the academic content of the active learning, or (3) the combination of academic material taught through physical activity.

Methods / Design: The Texas I-CAN project is a 3-arm, cluster randomized control trial in which 28 elementary schools were assigned to either control, math intervention, or spelling intervention. As a result, each intervention condition serves as an unrelated content control for the other arm of the trial, allowing the impact of physical activity to be separated from the content. That is, schools that perform only active math lessons provide a content control for the spelling schools on spelling outcomes. This also calculated direct observations of attention and behavior control following periods of active learning.

Discussion: This design is unique in its ability to separate the impact of physical activity, in general, from the combination of physical activity and specific academic content. This, in combination with the ability to examine both proximal and distal outcomes along with measures of time on task will do much to guide the design of future, school-based interventions.

Enrollment: 2,716 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• students in 4th grade in a participating elementary school and their 4th grade teachers

Exclusion criteria

• none

Trial design

Primary purpose: Other

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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2,716 participants in 3 patient groups

Texas I-CAN Active Math Lessons

Experimental group

Description:

Texas I-CAN Active math lesson in academic classroom

Treatment:

Behavioral: Texas I-CAN!

Texas I-CAN Active Language Arts Lessons

Experimental group

Description:

Texas I-CAN Active language arts lessons in academic classroom

Treatment:

Behavioral: Texas I-CAN!

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

Regular, Sedentary academic lessons in math and language arts