Beliefs and Previous Concepts about Physical Education in Primary Education Undergraduate Students

Abstract

The approach to the personal experiences and previous ideas about physical education of future primary education teachers is a starting point of great interest for the teaching of the subject of physical education didactics. The aim of the study is to investigate these prior beliefs and to verify to what extent this initial perception changes after taking the “Didactics of Physical Education” course. A concurrent mixed-methods study was conducted, which included two data collection procedures: (1) a pre-experimental design with a single group featuring a pre-test and post-test; (2) the analysis of students’ autobiographical accounts of their experiences with physical education in school. The participants were students enrolled in the Bachelor’s degree program in primary education at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) who undertook the course in 2022–2023. The results obtained reveal that after taking the Didactics of Physical Education course, students gave greater value to more positive concepts of learning, socializing, participating, and playing, among others. Similarly, in the post-test, the assessment of concepts such as competitiveness and physical fatigue diminished. In their autobiographical accounts, students associated good memories with relationships with classmates and the playful socializing nature of the subject; among the bad memories, they highlight the content related to physical performance, competitiveness, and lack of attention to the diversity of students and their individual characteristics.

Keywords

• beliefs
• preconceptions
• didactics of physical education
• concurrent mixed-methods study
• pre-service teacher education