Background: Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) plays a significant role in health and academic performance in youth. The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal relationship between CRF and academic performance from fifth to eighth grade among a large, diverse, and state-wide cohort of students, and to determine the extent to which the…

School-based body mass index (BMI) notification programs are often used to raise parental awareness of childhood overweight and obesity, but how BMI results are associated with physical fitness and diet is less clear. This study examined the relationship between BMI, fitness, and diet quality in a diverse sample of urban schoolchildren…

Purpose: As there is little research that investigates the experiences of minority boys participating in youth development programs (Fashola, 2003), the current research focused on a sport-based youth development program for early adolescent Black and Latino boys in Hartford, CT. Specifically, the present study explored (a) what attracted minority…

A wide variety of school-based physical activity contexts have been recently associated with various measures of academic performance. Of these studies, a small number employing objective measures of student fitness have identified a relationship with academic achievements. However, even among these studies, the fitness-academic link has not been…

In partnership with three universities, the Cooper Institute, Dallas, completed the Texas Youth Fitness Study from 2008 to 2009. The study explored three key questions: (1) Is physical fitness associated with academic performance?; (2) Can physical education teachers collect high-quality information on student fitness?; and (3) Are school policies…

This report summarizes results of a data analysis that attempts to answer the question of whether AISD students' physical fitness is related to their academic achievement in Spring 2006.