Taking It Out of PE: Transfer of Student Motivation

A ubiquitous goal of physical education (PE) has been that students learn the skills, knowledge, and motivation to engage in a lifetime of healthful physical activity. Thus, a preeminent question for any physical educator is whether their curriculum and instruction will influence students' behavior choices outside the PE environment. As a discipline, we have been somewhat reticent to pursue the empirical evidence required to validate that the PE experiences we provide positively influence students' choice to continue to engage in these movement forms within extra-curricular contexts. Failure to address this issue may be the result of long-term effects of PE in adulthood being mostly negative or an educational experience that had little impact on decisions to live an active lifestyle. From a research standpoint, the complexity of explaining the transfer phenomenon and, specifically, how to empirically parse out the role of PE in understanding students' wider active lifestyle choices has also been a challenge. Despite these barriers, understanding and facilitating student motivation and physical activity (PA) behavior transfer from PE to other PA contexts remains arguably a quintessential goal of PE. This scholar lecture will provide a summary of the author's research over the past two decades that has examined how different types of instructional models and content can influence students' motives to "take it out of PE."