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Interventions to Improve Child Physical Activity in the Early Childhood Education and Care Setting: An Umbrella Review

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posted on 2025-05-10, 19:37 authored by Melanie Lum, Luke WolfendenLuke Wolfenden, Jannah JonesJannah Jones, Alice GradyAlice Grady, Hayley Christian, Kathryn ReillyKathryn Reilly, Sze YoongSze Yoong
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are a key setting to support improvements in the physical activity of young children. This umbrella review gathered and synthesised systematic review evidence of the effectiveness of interventions in the ECEC setting on the physical activity levels of children aged 0–6. We also mapped the current evidence to the existing ECEC sector-specific physical activity practice recommendations. Five electronic databases were searched to identify systematic reviews that evaluated the impact of any ECEC-based interventions on the physical activity levels (e.g., moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, total physical activity) of children aged 0–6. One reviewer extracted data on intervention effectiveness and quality of the reviews, checked by a second reviewer. Ten reviews were included. Overall, the majority of the reviews found interventions delivered in ECEC improved child physical activity. Across reviews, the impact of six intervention strategies were identified, mapped to four (of eight) broad recommendations (i.e., providing opportunity, offering educator training, educators promoting the benefits of physical activity, creating a physical activity-promoting environment). The impact of the majority of recommendations, however, did not have systematic review evidence. Further investigation of the effectiveness of ECEC-based physical activity strategies is required to demonstrate support for the existing recommended practices.

History

Journal title

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Volume

19

Issue

4

Article number

1963

Publisher

MDPI AG

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing

School

School of Medicine and Public Health

Rights statement

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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