Monitoring physical fitness to enhance the development of physical literacy in children and adolescents

ongoing

FitBack4Literacy will bring together 10 partnering institutions across Europe, alongside several associated international organisations, in an effort to expand the Fitback network across research, educational and sport sectors. The overarching aim of FitBack4Literacy is to design and test an open, transnational fitness monitoring webtool to deliver pertinent feedback to educators, children, youth, and their parents as a means of directly enhancing Physical Literacy (PL) development for all. PL is a concept that includes the physical, social, cognitive, and emotional understanding that people develop to maintain physical activity at an appropriate, healthy level throughout their life. FitBack4Literacy will focus its activities at the local level (e.g., schools, sport clubs) to accelerate paediatric PL development via: 1) Involving teachers and coaches in a co-design process to upgrade the existing Fitback system by constructing a PL toolkit containing group reports and learning materials, 2) Leveraging the support of several international sport and physical education associations in engaging stakeholders in an attempt to reduce stigma, and support a positive experience around physical fitness testing, and 3) Evaluating the upgraded FitBack reporting system, including a novel, multi-lingual PL toolkit, which will be tested across eight European-wide sites to determine its feasibility and effectiveness in improving PL. All these activities will be conducted across varied sectors, socio-cultural environments, and child fitness levels. Through the main output of the project, an open, multilingual fitness reporting webtool, FitBack4Literacy will provide a novel tool to assist teachers, coaches and youth across Europe in the process of improving PL. In this way, FitBack4Literacy targets multiple UN Sustainable Development goals in its endeavour to disseminate fitness expertise across multiple sectors, supporting fostering long-term, positive health outcomes in youth.