A large portion of research on attitudes toward exercise in children has examined situations in physical education classes. To make improvements to the physical activity engaged in on a daily basis, it is necessary to consider the attitudes of children toward situations including a variety of exercise. In previous research, it was thought that exercise was influenced by children's feelings of competence in exercising, their desire to exercise, and their values toward exercising, which were thought to be associated with differences in gender and grade.
This study defines “exercise attitude” as the attitude toward exercise and sports, using a measure of exercise attitudes to elucidate the reality of the situation.
This study discusses whether gender and grade differences influence exercise attitudes. A questionnaire was conducted on 2,141 students from the fourth to sixth grade in B City, A Prefecture.
The main results were as follows：
1) Children had high ambitions for types of exercise and their own physical strength with an emphasis placed on strictly adhering to discipline. However, a tendency to exercise was observed as children lacked confidence in exercise, athletic abilities, and expressive exercise.
2) On conducting a factor analysis from our measure of exercise attitudes, three factors were identified： “self-esteem toward exercising,” “desire to exercise,” and “support from peers”.
3) Boys place a higher value on self-esteem toward exercising than girls, while girls place a higher value on desire to exercise and support from peers.
4) Self-esteem toward exercise drops off as children advance to higher grades.
On the basis of these results, the tendency for factors of gender and age differences to influence attitudes toward exercise was considered to be confirmed. Discussing exercise support was considered to be a challenge moving forward.

The purpose of this study was to elucidate the relationship between cognition and performance in controlling the half-distance of the maximum standing long jump among 4- and 5-year-old children and to clarify the age and sex difference.
First, subjects were instructed to jump as far as they could. Next, they pointed to the half-distance of their maximum distance, as judged by themselves (cognitive task). After that, they jumped to their self-perceived half-distance (half-jump task). Both the subjects' perceived and actual distances were recorded. As a result, in the cognitive task, the relative values of the 4-year-old children were distributed over the wide area of the 10-100% stand. On the other hand, those of the 5-year-old children were distributed over the 30-90% stand, and many of them converged to a 40-60% stand. In the half-jump task, the relative values reached a similar distribution to the cognitive task, and significant correlations were found between the cognitive and half-jump tasks for both age and sex. In both the cognitive and half-jump tasks, the boys showed greater values than the girls, and 4-year-old children showed greater values than did the 5-year-old children.
It is concluded that the ability to both perceive and actually attain the half-jump distance developed markedly between the ages of 4 and 5. In addition, among all children, it was suggested that the ability to perceive the half-distance strongly effected on the actual half-jump performance.

The aim of this study was to investigate changes in sagittal posture alignment in quiet standing during a period of growth in Japanese middle and high school students. Measurements were taken from one hundred male students, from the first year of middle school up to the second year of high school, with their head and shoulders angled forward. The head and shoulder forward angle significantly shifted in students from the time they were in the second year of middle school to the time they were in the first year of high school (p=0.001-0.006). The results showed that static posture alignment can change easily during this period. Therefore, it may be important to encourage middle school students to maintain correct posture alignment at home and in school.