European Physical Education Review

This paper reviews the use of the classroom ecology paradigm in teaching research in physical education. The review traces the development of a research program beginning in the United States at the Ohio State University, through the development of more sophisticated techniques, to answer the following key question:‘Why do some physical education classes seem so remarkably alive with learning potential and others seem so devoid of that very characteristic?’The classroom ecology paradigm examines the collective life of teachers and students as interaction among three interrelated systems (managerial, instructional, and student social) in which change in one system has distinct repercussions for the development of the others. Central to this representation is the issue of accountability, and this review provides a longitudinal account of research relating to this feature of the paradigm.The major findings of this review present a picture of physical education in which considerable negotiation takes place within many classes, where teachers trade off a reduction in the demands of the instructional system for cooperation in the management system.What accountability remains focuses primarily on orderly management, student cooperation, and at least minimal effort in activity tasks.Lack of alignment between unit objectives,practice tasks, and accountability measures accounts for typically poor student performance. Instructional ecologies at the elementary school level are more rigorous than at the secondary level. Finally, this review provides suggestions for future research in physical education, urging a focus more on student responses than teacher actions in our efforts to understand instructional effectiveness.

While some bodies of literature address the construction of school physical education and others the construction of university study of physical activity (e.g. physical education, human movement studies), little attention has been paid to the interface between these sites.This is somewhat surprising given the significant growth and popularity of the physical activity field in universities and that together they form a cyclical relationship in that the university disciplinary knowledge is central to physical education teacher education.This paper introduces aspects of the production, reproduction, adaptation, and modification of educational discourse as students move from school physical education into human movement studies. In doing so, it will highlight dominant dimensions of the regulative discourse, the strengths and weaknesses in the classification and framing of knowledge within school and tertiary programmes, and introduce a relatively unique line of research into the construction of educational discourse in school subjects.

The relationship between gender, perceived self-competence and physical activity has come under increasing scrutiny over recent years. Males are more likely than female >to consider themselves to be competent in the physical domain and to derive height >ened self-worth from physical activities, including sport.The present study considere >patterns of physical activity, with a particular focus on involvement with sport, amon >a sample of 602 young people.The study was based on diary reports and face-to-fac >interviews, along with measures of perceived self-competence and self-worth a >derived from the work of Harter. The results indicated that boys spent more tim >participating in sport than girls and that boys reported higher perceptions of ‘athleti >self-competence’ and ‘global self-worth’ than girls. At the same time, both boys an >girls who were more active in sport were more likely to be characterized by hig >levels of self-worth than their more sedentary counterparts.

This paper uses evidence from surveys in 1997 among a total of 900 young people (aged 20–26) in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine to assess the impact of post-communism on their participation in sport and other leisure activities. Despite the rundown of public facilities and organized youth sport, participation was holding up reasonably well.Young males (and rather fewer females) were creating their own opportunities to play sport in parks and other open spaces. However, the main trends in young people’s leisure were towards home-centredness, which was associated with rising investment in home entertainment equipment, towards spending money on ‘quality’ holidays, and towards making regular visits to the bars and restaurants that private commerce had opened in all three countries.It is argued that participant sport is highly vulnerable to, rather than a likely beneficiary of, the reforms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and that this situation is likely to continue into the 21st century.