ArticleJMIR serious games2026
Sports App Involvement and Core Literacy in Physical Education and Health Among University Students: Randomized Experiment and Cross-Sectional Study.
Article in JMIR serious games, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Sports apps can support physical activity through self-monitoring, feedback, and engagement features; however, evidence regarding their broader health-related outcomes remains mixed. The roles of digitalization and gamification in the association between sports app involvement and core literacy in physical education and health also remain unclear. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate a multicomponent app-supported physical activity intervention and examine the cross-sectional associations between sports app involvement and core literacy in physical education and health, including indirect statistical associations through digitalization and gamification. Methods: This study comprised 2 quantitative studies with independent samples. Study 1 used a Solomon 4-group randomized design in which 120 university students were allocated equally to the pretested experimental, pretested control, unpretested experimental, or unpretested control groups. The experimental groups received a 12-week multicomponent app-supported physical activity intervention, and 107 participants completed the postintervention assessment. A 2×2 factorial analysis of variance tested intervention and pretest main effects and their interaction, supplemented by a reference-based attrition sensitivity analysis. Study 2 surveyed 790 students from 8 universities and used latent-variable structural equation modeling to estimate direct and indirect cross-sectional associations, with age and sex included as covariates. The primary model assumed independence between participants; secondary composite-score sensitivity analyses examined additional covariate adjustment and university clustering. Results: In Study 1, significant intervention main effects were observed for self-reported motor competence ( Conclusions: The multicomponent app-supported intervention yielded higher self-reported motor competence, health behavior, and sportsmanship scores than the control condition. In the independent cross-sectional sample, sports app involvement was positively associated with core literacy, with specific indirect associations through digitalization, gamification, and digitalization followed by gamification. Digitalization showed the largest specific indirect association. Further studies should assess objective outcomes and examine these associations longitudinally with broader measurement of potential confounders.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.