From Past till Presence – The Quality of German Physical Activity Kindergarten (PAK)

Abstract

Physical Activity Education (PAE) has always been playing an important role in the history of Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Germany and its institutionalized form called “Kindergarten”. As a key feature of Kindergarten quality Physical Activity (PA) was originally considered to be either a compensation for children’s health dangers along with the neglect by their hard working mothers or a mere medium for other developmental fields such as cognition or social behavior. The subjectively observed outcome for the pedagogues was far from empirically objective evidence. Till the 1970s neither the technical term “quality” nor any empirical quality standards existed in German ECE to assess the effect of PA in Kindergarten. This fairly hasn’t changed yet although some general findings of high quality effects can be reported as well as PA specific results from a recent review on systematic PAE programmes. Despite this fact, Germany’s organized sports associations (OSA) installed 1759 Physical Activity Kindergarten (PAK) with great expectations in their overall positive developmental effect. For quality assurance some criteria were developed to achieve a minimum standard level. Subsequently a very popular license originated without having evidence for its positive outcome. A randomized, controlled longitudinal study is still to come.

Keywords

• physical activity kindergarten
• quality
• early childhood education