Effects of the Healthmpowers Exercise DVD Program on the Behavior of Disruptive Students in a Fourth Grade Classroom

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a classroom exercise video program on the behavior of fourth grade students who displayed disruptive behaviors in the classroom. Six students, 5 identified as consistently off-task, and their 23-year old female student teacher were participants. An Alternating Treatments Experimental Design (Cooper, Heron & Heward, 2007) was used to investigate the effects of a classroom exercise program called HealthMPowers on the off-task behavior of selected students during a regularly scheduled morning math class. Two interventions were used on alternate days during this study: a) exercising for approximately 2-minutes to a clip from the HealthMPowers exercise DVD program and b) a control procedure—placing the head down on the desk. Baseline measurements were conducted until the level of off-task behavior during the math class stabilized for most of the participants (no conspicuous trending up or down). At that point, the whole class in which the participants were enrolled received one of the two interventions (exercise with video or head down) on an alternating schedule with one intervention each day. Visual analysis was used to assess the degree of consistency and magnitude of the effect. Observations were made using a 10-second interval recording procedure and interobserver reliability averaged 94% for occurrence reliability and 96% for total reliability. Results indicated that off-task performance stabilized for most students during the third week of baseline and decreased by an average of 13% during the seven weeks that the exercise and head-down interventions were in use. Although the mean decrease in off-task behavior for the exercise intervention was slightly greater, it was not notably different from the head-down procedure.