Influence of attending extracurricular sports activities on functional abilities of fifth and sixth grade elementary school students

Abstract

The sample consisted of 121 respondents from fifth and sixth-grade elementary schools from the City of Zadar. A research was conducted to determine the differences between students who, in addition to physical education and health education, also attend some other form of extracurricular sports activity. By conducting a descriptive analysis, we obtained results that show us that male students engaged in extracurricular activity achieved 21.28% better average results than respondents who do not engage in extracurricular activities. Female respondents engaged in extracurricular activities achieved 9.16% better results than respondents who did not engage in extracurricular activities (better scores in the test to assess functional ability (F6 test)). Using the t-test, we found that empirical levels of significance were statistically significant (p = 0.000) for all respondents in both sexes in functional abilities (F6 test). The authors can claim that students attending some forms of extracurricular sports activity have a better score in the variable F6. By performing regression analysis, authors cannot predict the result in the F6 test based on anthropometric characteristics of body height (TV) and body weight (TT). To improve the functional abilities of students, each teacher should encourage them to attend some additional forms of extracurricular sports activities in the form of improving the overall anthropological status.

Keywords

• extracurricular activities
• physical education
• functional abilities