Abstract
The purpose of the current study was to develop and test a method for assessing the effect of outdoor activity context on level of physical activity in preschool children. The observational system for recording physical activity in children was used to define the test conditions and various levels of physical activity within a multielement design. In general, all participants were fairly sedentary during the analysis. The fixed playground equipment condition produced the most moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, a finding that does not correspond to the descriptive assessment literature on childhood physical activity.