Effectiveness of Meaningful Learning Implementation in Physical Education

Background: In recent years, the Israeli Ministry of Education has set a requirement from teachers of all disciplines to integrate meaningful learning. Although many Physical Education (PE) teachers excused themselves from the requirement and engaged in practical teaching only, a number of PE teachers sought to develop meaningful-learning in their field. The teachers conducted meaningful-learning activities using a variety of active discussions, using topics from the PE curriculum.

Aims: To examine the effectiveness of meaningful learning in PE, as a method of improving student motivation in practical PE lessons, their level of theoretical knowledge and their attitudes toward the subjects taught, as well as the implementation of those subjects by an actual change of behavior.

Methods: Four PE teachers and 353 sixth-grade students from four different schools participated in the study. Six classes (174 students) participated in the experimental group and six classes (179 students) served as the control group. Students responded to questionnaires before and after the meaningful-learning process. In addition, observations were conducted during practical PE lessons.

Results: Integrating meaningful-learning activities in PE, compared with only practical lessons, showed medium to high improvements in all variables.

Discussion and Conclusion: Using meaningful-learning methods in PE can lead to significant improvement in achieving the curriculum goals in terms of knowledge gained, student attitudes, and actual behavioral change. However, further research is needed to determine the correct degree of integrating these methods with the practical lessons and to test the effectiveness of additional meaningful-learning methods that were not used in this study.