Mis-Conceptions in Socio-Emotional and Cognitive Aspects of Youth Physical Activity Engagement in Under-Resourced Communities

A gold-standard approach to motivating and sustaining children's physical activity (PA) engagement is to facilitate their physical literacy (PL) development. The purpose of this study was to identify cognitive and social-motivational affective conceptual needs for potential PL development in under-resourced pre-to-early adolescent children who enrolled in existing after-school programs. Semi-structured interview and field observation data were collected to gauge the level of scientific declarative and procedural PA knowledge as verbalized and/or displayed. Interview themes revealed naïve conceptions and mis-conceptions. The triangulation of findings from the interview data with observation data results indicated apparent impact of children's naïve conceptions and mis-conceptions on their PA engagement. Findings highlight the importance of targeting foundational cognitive and social-motivational knowledge as precursors to broader PL development, suggesting the need for multi-domain PL interventions to strengthen children's knowledge base and support long-term positive PA behavior.