AN EVALUATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL PHYSICAL EDUCATION WEBSITES

Abstract

Websites will become increasingly important to physical education departments as they seek to communicate the goals and content of their programs. A well developed website is an educational tool physical educators can use in their efforts to teach students about physical activity and health. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of website utilization and the components of websites in use in middle and high school physical education programs. In order to determine the status of active websites as well as the content and design quality of physical education websites in middle and high schools, 285 school websites in two Southern California counties were searched during October 2007. In order to assess the quality of those websites, a website checklist was utilized to evaluate content and design features that should be included on a website. The features on the checklist were organized into categories of content, control (navigation), consistency (readability), and corroboration (accountability). Only 50 (17.5%) of the 285 identified schools had an active physical education department website. In addition, most of the physical education websites were incomplete and lacked important design and content features. Consequently, most of the websites did not favorably represent their departments or the profession of physical education. The low percentage of websites found and the low quality of the websites that were discovered indicate that most physical educators are not taking advantage of an educational tool that has great potential to both promote their department and aid in student learning. Since websites will become increasingly important to physical education departments, physical education teachers need to create websites that are well designed in order to strengthen their efforts to teach students about physical activity and health.?