Promoting schoolchildren’s self-esteem in physical education: testing the effectiveness of a five-month teacher training

ABSTRACT

Background: Schoolchildren’s personality development is considered a central goal of physical education (PE). With regard to the relationship between psychological well-being and global self-esteem over the life course, the promotion of positive self-esteem is an issue of particular significance. Past research revealed that PE taught with an individualized teacher frame of reference (iTFR) and a reflexive teaching style is associated with positive effects on facets of children’s perceived sports competence. However, it remains an open question whether this teaching styles has the potential to promote positive self-esteem.

Purpose: The present study investigated whether a five-month teacher training, aimed to enhance the teachers’ iTFR and their reflexive teaching style in PE, has a positive effect on students’ perceived sports competence and their global self-esteem. To analyse the implementation quality, changes in students’ perceived iTFR and perceived reflexive teaching style were investigated.

Method: A total of 21 teachers were assigned to either an intervention group (n?=?13), receiving the five-month teacher training, or a control group (n?=?8) consisting of regular teaching without teacher training. The teacher training encompassed five three-hour consecutive sessions during which the teachers acquired theoretical and practical knowledge about the promotion of competence perceptions in PE with a reflexive teaching style and an iTFR. Between the sessions, the teachers were instructed to implement an iTFR and a reflexive teaching style into their own PE classes. To evaluate the effects of the teacher training, their students’ (N?=?315, 53.7% girls, M_age?=?13.2 y, SD_age?=?1.3 y) perceived teaching style (iTFR and reflexive teaching), perceived sports competence and global self-esteem were measured with paper-pencil questionnaires at three measurement points (pre, post and follow-up).

Findings: Linear mixed effect models showed that students of the intervention group reported an increase in their teachers’ reflexive teaching style, but there were no changes with regard to iTFR. With regard to students’ perceived sports competence and global self-esteem, there were significant interaction effects between time and group over a period of eight months (from pre-test to follow-up), indicating positive effects on these self-concept dimensions due to the teacher training.

Conclusion: The present study indicates that a long-term teacher training supports PE teachers to implement teaching styles with the aim to promote students’ self-concept. Furthermore, the findings lead to the assumption that a more pronounced iTFR in combination with an enhanced reflexive teaching style has the potential to positively influence schoolchildren’s perceived sports competence and global self-esteem.     

Motivbasierte Passung von Sportprogrammen

Regarding the phenomenon of mood improvements through physical exercise, secondary analyses indicate that improvements can hardly be generalised. Rather, personal and situational factors need to be taken into consideration in order to define the effects in a more precise manner. This contribution investigates to what extent explicit motives and goals of individuals in middle adulthood can be considered as personal moderators of mood changes. Five exercise programmes were developed in a quasi-experimental design and were conducted over a 3-month intervention period. These programmes were based on the “motive-based types of sportsperson” (Sudeck, Lehnert & Conzelmann, 2011), which define groups of individuals with similar motive and goal profiles. One hundred and thirty-three individuals participated in either a programme tailor-made to their motive and goal profile or in a non-tailored programme. The influence of this motive-based tailoring was investigated based on the mood dimensions of valence, calmness and positive activation using handheld PCs during and after exercise sessions. Results indicate a moderating influence of explicit motives and goals. This moderation was however not a general one but rather depended on the exercise programmes’ specific goals and content as well as on individuals’ goals regarding recreation. These findings point towards a systematic consideration of explicit motives and goals in the planning of health and leisure sport programmes.     

The pedagogical benefits of enacting positive psychology practices through a student–faculty partnership approach to academic development

Academic development that supports the enactment of positive psychology practices through student–faculty pedagogical partnership can increase faculty confidence and capacity in their first year in a new institution. When student partners practice affirmation and encouragement of strengths-based growth, processes of faculty acclimation and self-authoring can be accelerated. This article presents a student–faculty pedagogical partnership program and positive psychology practices that focus on faculty strengths and capacities as the foundation for reinforcing and revising existing pedagogical strategies and for sustaining energy for continued development. It combines collaborative autoethnographic and comparative case study approaches to investigate the pedagogical benefits of these practices.     

Summarization based on bi-directional citation analysis

Automatic document summarization using citations is based on summarizing what others explicitly say about the document, by extracting a summary from text around the citations (citances). While this technique works quite well for summarizing the impact of scientific articles, other genres of documents as well as other types of summaries require different approaches. In this paper, we introduce a new family of methods that we developed for legal documents summarization to generate catchphrases for legal cases (where catchphrases are a form of legal summary). Our methods use both incoming and outgoing citations, and we show how citances can be combined with other elements of cited and citing documents, including the full text of the target document, and catchphrases of cited and citing cases. On a legal summarization corpus, our methods outperform competitive baselines. The combination of full text sentences and catchphrases from cited and citing cases is particularly successful. We also apply and evaluate the methods on scientific paper summarization, where they perform at the level of state-of-the-art techniques. Our family of citation-based summarization methods is powerful and flexible enough to target successfully a range of different domains and summarization tasks.