AJHE Table of Contents
A Qualitative Study of the Benefits and Challenges of Fitness Testing and Activity Monitoring in School; Interviews with School Staff in Southern California
Margaret Schneider, Amanda Woodworth, Allyson Reeds & Trent D. Brown
Physical inactivity is a behavioral pandemic (Hall et al.,
2021; Pratt et al., 2020) that begins during childhood and
adolescence (World Health Organization, 2022), and an
analysis of 1.6 million students across the globe in 2016
found that 81% did not meet physical activity (PA) guidelines
(Guthold et al., 2020). Although a comparable global
estimate of youth meeting PA guidelines has not been
issued since 2020, a report on the Global Matrix 4.0
Physical Activity Report Card (Aubert et al., 2022), published
in 2022, concluded that “the average grades calculated
for the 10 PA common indicators were all between
D and C+, indicating that we are not succeeding at promoting
PA among children and adolescents globally” (p. 709).
To address this problem, there is a compelling need to
improve adolescent physical activity surveillance (van
Sluijs et al., 2021).
Historically, PA surveillance has been accomplished
through self-report. The Youth Behavioral Risk
Surveillance System (YRBSS) in the United States,
conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention every 3 years, provides estimates of the proportion
of high school youth meeting PA guidelines, and data
from 2023 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
2025b; Michael et al., 2023) found that only 25% high
school students met recommended PA guidelines. Data
from 2019 (the most recent date for which Californiaspecific
data are available) show that 38.7% California
high school students met PA guidelines (Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, 2025a). While useful as
a periodic indicator of the health of the nation, such sample-
based surveillance systems do not facilitate the evaluation
of interventions or enable identification of effective
local policies. To afford these evaluative functions, data are
needed at the local community level.
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