Spittle, Sharna (2015) An examination of teacher confidence and motivation to teach primary school physical education. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Primary school physical education can provide important opportunities for children to be active in environments that support the development of movement and sports skills. Research has highlighted that many Australian children display low levels of physical activity and motor co-ordination (Morgan et al., 2013), making the delivery of quality physical education at a primary school level even more important. In Australia, primary physical education is regularly delivered by generalist primary school teachers, who may have limited training in the curriculum area. It appears, however, that the pre-service and in-service generalist teachers who constitute critical factors in the delivery of quality physical education have low levels of confidence and also potentially lower motivation to teach in this domain. Although research consistently confirms lower levels of confidence, the measures used often lack detail of their development and supporting psychometric evaluation. Validity and reliability is not often assessed or reported and measures tend to be narrowly focused on particular areas of physical education. Although confidence has been explored, motivation has rarely been investigated in relation to teaching primary physical education, despite a range of measures of general motivation for teaching. For this reason, validated and psychometrically evaluated instruments to assess the motivation to teach physical education warrant construction.

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