Students’ motivation in a disc golf-lesson and a soccer-lesson: An experimental study in the Physical Education setting

Abstract

One of the purposes of physical education (PE) in both Norway and Denmark is that PE should inspire to a lifelong active lifestyle. Based on the self-determination theory, the aim of the present study was to compare students’ intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and perceived competence in a lifestyle sport inspired PE-lesson (disc golf) to a traditional PE-lesson (soccer) and general PE. In addition, we aimed to investigate whether differences in motivation and perceived competence were conditional of the students’ relative attitude toward PE. The result of the study revealed that perceived competence was higher in the disc golf-lesson compared to the soccer-lesson and general PE. No overall differences in intrinsic motivation were found. However, when investigating differences in intrinsic motivation according to the students’ relative attitude toward PE, the results indicated that the students with a negative attitude toward PE was significantly more intrinsically motivated in disc golf-lesson compared to soccer-lesson and general PE. The findings may be seen as further recommendations to physical educators to vary the activity choices in physical education classes.

Keywords

• Lifestyle sports
• physical education
• intrinsic motivation
• extrinsic motivation
• percieved competence, sports motivation