Physical Education Curriculum is Effective in Development of Motor Abilities in 9th grade School Children?

Abstract

Physical education plays an important role in developing motor abilities, skills and competence in children. Main objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of physical education curriculum by assessing in 9th grade schoolchildren: (1) abdominal muscle strength; (2) lower back muscle strength; (3) upper limbs muscle strength; (4) lower limbs muscle strength; (5) explosive leg power; and (6) flexibility of the lower back and hamstring muscles, at the beginning, and at the end of the school term. Basic mathematical and appropriate statistical methods were used in order to calculate descriptive statistical parameters, Skewness and Kurtosis values, as well as KolmogorovSmirnov test, were used in order to examine whether data have a normal distribution, and a Student’s t-test was applied in order to test if there is a statistically significant difference in children’s motor abilities between the beginning and the end of the school term. For this purpose, we used Microsoft Office Excel 2010. At the end of the second school term, children in 9th grade have shown better results in all assessed variables, meaning they have increased motor ability levels after 4 months of applying specific exercises within the thematic plan of the physical education curriculum, which leads to the conclusion that physical education curriculum allows us to introduce effective tasks in increasing strength, explosive power and flexibility in 9th grade school children