The Effect of Physical Activity Games within Physical Education Lessons on Character Development of Elementary School Students

Abstract

This study aimed to examine whether physical activity games within physical education lessons affect on character development of fourth class elementary students. It has been implemented as an experimental design which included pre-test post-test with control group in the research. The study was carried out on two groups, experimental and control groups, consisting of a total of 60 students. Both groups were implemented "Youth Sports Value Questionnaire" which originally developed by Martin J. Lee, Jean Whitehead and Nick Balchin (2000) and later reorganised by Frogozo (2006), as a pre-test before training and as a post-test after training. SPSS was used for statistical analysis of research data. In the data analysis, "arithmetic mean", "standard deviation" and "t-test" were used. At the end of the research, it is found that physical activity games prepared for the development of character in addition to the matters Physical Education course affected on the character development of students in the experimental group. Even though there was an increase between pre-test and post-test values of students in the control group taking only physical education course, this increase was not significantly different in favor of posttest.