Physical Education Theory and Methodology (Mar 2018)

Using Movement Test to Evaluate Effectiveness of Health and Fitness Activities of Students in Higher Education Institutions

  • S. Pashkevich,
  • I. Kriventsova,
  • K. Galicheva

DOI
https://doi.org/10.17309/tmfv.2018.1.02
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 1
pp. 12 – 22

Abstract

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The study objective is to evaluate the possibility of using screening methods for determining the effectiveness of health and fitness activities of students in higher education institutions. Materials and methods. The participants in the experiment were 37 first-year students (17 boys and 20 girls) of the School of History of H. S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University. The experiment lasted during the fall semester. Using the Framingham method for analyzing weekly timing, the study conducted a survey among the students on their level of motor activity and performed a functional movement screen testing. To tentatively evaluate the cause and effect relationship between the level of motor activity and the occurrence of a pathological movement pattern, the study used the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The characteristics between the groups were analyzed by using the Mann-Whitney test for comparing the distribution of ordinal variables. Results. The correlation analysis showed that the first-year students’ motor activity was positively related to the results of functional movement screening (R=+0.69, p< 0.05). At the same time, the students (EG1) who mainly had a high level of physical activity at physical education classes showed low values of functional movement evaluation, compared to the students (EG2) participating in extra-curricular physical activity. In EG1, the overall screening score was 10.3±0.7, in EG2 — 14.2±0.9 (p<0.05). Conclusions. The students with insufficient weekly motor activity had risk values of the test (10.3±0.7), which requires further analysis of the causes of a pathological movement pattern. The study results have confirmed the existence of the relationship between motor activity indicators and functional movement evaluation (R=+0.69, p<0.05). This provides a way to use the screening method of determining motor competence for the effectiveness evaluation of health and fitness programs, but further research is needed.

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