Teaching behaviour of PE teachers: a quantitative and qualitative investigation

Abstract

While there has been a considerable amount of research completed in the area of teaching, the use of comparative data in the form of norms has been neglected. This study aimed to address this problem by investigating the behaviours of 10 female physical education teachers from various schools using the Arizona State University Observation Instrument (A.S.U.O.I) in conjunction with a qualitative analysis of the interactions between the teacher and pupils. The use of combined methods allowed both a detailed analysis of the actual behaviours and of the reasons for those behaviours to be done in a complementary way. The ASUOI was implemented in Focus X2 and there was a good level of inter-operator agreement for behaviour (κ = 0.628) and a moderate strength of inter-operator agreement for identifying where pupil name was used (κ = 0.422). The results showed the more frequent behaviours in the categories of pre-instruction (23.4%), silent monitoring (22.3%) and management (17.5%) followed by questioning (12.9%) and concurrent instruction (10.2%). The qualitative analysis highlighted 5 key themes; temporal ordering of events, management, scolding, reactive teaching and series of tasks. There were significant differences between the teachers for the distribution of lesson time among the different behaviours (p < 0.001). Quartile norms were determined for each frequency, duration and %time variable allowing teacher behaviour to be interpreted in relation to a relevant population