College Student Perception of Wellness Concepts.

Dealing with the public perception of Physical Education and wellness has been a constant struggle for many professionals in this area of study. Many perceive Physical Education / wellness as an “easy” course or simply non-essential. These perceptions may contribute to the gap between one’s explicit knowledge (i.e., perception of knowledge) and implicit knowledge (i.e., actual knowledge). A required university Lifetime Wellness course may impact students’ explicit and implicit knowledge. The purpose of this study was to examine perception and knowledge differences among college students enrolled in a Lifetime Wellness course. Perception surveys and knowledge tests were administered to approximately 500 students. A repeated measures design was employed allowing for the comparison of differences between four combinations of variables: pre- and post-perception, pre- and post-knowledge, pre-perception and pre-knowledge, and post-perception and post-knowledge. Based on these combinations, there were four hypotheses: (1) post-perception scores would be higher than pre-perception scores, (2) post-knowledge scores would be higher than pre-knowledge scores, (3) pre-perception scores would be higher than preknowledge scores, and (4) post-perception scores would be higher than post-knowledge scores. The results revealed significantly higher post-perception scores (overall mean = 14.6%; p #0.01) and post-knowledge scores (overall mean = 9.4%; p # 0.01) for all wellness topics. It was concluded that students’ perception of knowledge (explicit knowledge) and actual knowledge (implicit knowledge) of Wellness topics improved following a Lifetime Wellness course.?