Effects of a 14-week intervention in physical education on childrens social self-concept

Magnaguagno, Lukas; Schmidt, Mirko; Valkanover, Stefan; Conzelmann, Achim (15 February 2013). Effects of a 14-week intervention in physical education on childrens social self-concept (Unpublished). In: Sport Bewegung und Gesundheit im Lebenslauf. Basel.

Introduction
As in general the school subject sport has its legitimacy in the personal development function, physical education is proclaimed repeatedly as a suitable medium to promote social learning (Süssenbach & Hoffmann, 2011). This pedagogical postulate is also maintained in educational poli-cy position and curricula papers (Magnaguagno, 2010). Empirical evidence for a positive effect of physical education on the social self-concept provides the Berner Interventionsstudie Schulsport (BISS) which shows that sport-based presentation of social learning over ten weeks increase as-pects of the social self-concept (Conzelmann, Schmidt & Valkanover, 2011). In intervention studies for self-concept development is usually neglected the implementation control. However, the level of the implementation is a significant factor for the program effectiveness (Drössler, Jerusalem & Mit-tag, 2007). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of physical educa-tion on childrens social self-concept by consider the accuracy of the implementation.
Methods
The sample of this quasi-experimental longitudinal study comprised 310 Children (mean age = 10.9, 50.5% girls) from 15 elementary school classes. These were divided into three groups of each five (experimental group+, experimental group- and control group). Here, the teachers of the experi-mental groups differ in terms of the training program and intervention monitoring. The intervention took place in two of the three obligatory physical education lessons per week, themed social learn-ing in the field of small and large sports games and used the reflexive imparting as the main meth-od.
Based on a preliminary analysis for the students perceived implementation accuracy, the independ-ent variable was build by three new groups - classes which had no (G1), small (G2) and medium to large (G3) effects (ɳ2) of an increased awareness of reflexive actions in physical education. The de-pended variable includes five dimensions of social self-concept (perspective takeover, cooperation capacity, conflict capability, social acceptance, social self-efficacy) but only one is reported. The scale of cooperation capacity consists of softly modified items from Kanning (2009) and Sygusch (2007) and has an acceptable value of reliability (Cronbach’s α = .68). To evaluate the effects of the intervention, an analysis of variance was performed with repeated measures.
Results
Of the five dimensions of social self-concept only the cooperation capacity shows a significant in-teraction effect of both the comparison between G3 vs. G1 (F(1,237) = 3.78, p = .027, ɳ2 = .016) and G3 vs. G2 (F(1,159) = 5.30, p = .011, ɳ2 = .032). The other four dimensions present indeed a positive development, but the differences between the groups are statistically not significant.
Discussion
These results show that individual dimensions of social self-concept can be influenced positively by specifically staged physical education based on the reflective sports imparting. As effects are exclusively identified for G3, it can be deduced that only a significant improvement in students per-ceived awareness of reflection components in physical education promote the social self-concept. The preliminary analysis for implementation accuracy also shows that the increase of reflexive ac-tions from the perspective of the students in the experimental group+ differs significant of both the experimental group- and the control group (p = .041, p = .000, respectively). A change in the sports imparting or rather the mediation forms of sports teacher must therefore be initiated by appropriate training and support.

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