CYCLE Kids

Funded by the American Heart Association through its Community Impact Grant program and with additional funds from the Dudley Allen Sargent Research Fund and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at Boston University, Dr. Quatromoni partnered with CYCLE Kids, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, MA dedicated to achieving child health promotion through physical activity and proper nutrition. Dr. Quatromoni and her team of students have worked with CYCLE Kids for over a decade, developing and refining the nutrition education curriculum components to align with the bicycling education curriculum that is at the core of CYCLE Kids. The BU-based team developed the CYCLE Kids pre- and post-program assessment to measure changes in knowledge, attitudes and personal behaviors achieved by program participants. A qualitative analysis of narratives written by CYCLE Kids students provided additional evidence of the psycho-social impact of the program on student well-being.

The Specific Aims of the CYCLE Kids project were to:

1. develop a nutrition education curriculum to integrate with the existing CYCLE Kids bicycle skills curriculum
2. evaluate the impact of the CYCLE Kids curriculum taught in afterschool settings and in physical education units in middle-school