David Kirk

University of Strathclyde · School of Education

The main purpose of this study was to identify the challenges of using formative assessment (FA) and authentic assessment (AA) in physical education (PE) teaching, based on some experienced teachers’ perspectives. Semi-structured interviews of four teachers were conducted and analysed. The results show how the teachers operationalised the FA and AA...

Background: Affective learning has been recognised increasingly as a significant outcome of physical education. This focus on the affective domain comes at a time when there is increasing concern about health and wellbeing of children and young people and, in particular about the rising prevalence of mental health issues. The literature established...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to carry out a systematic review of intervention programs that have addressed affective learning outcomes within physical education and to explore pedagogical practices in alignment with teaching, lesson content, and learning outcomes. Method: The literature search was conducted in accordance with the Preferr...

Physical education is expected to play a significant role in developing pupils’ health. This is the case in Scotland, where physical education is located in a prioritised cross-curricular area of Health and Wellbeing (HWB). However, there is a lack of evidence on the extent to which physical education contributes to pupils’ HWB under the new curric...

Physical education is expected to play a significant role in developing pupils’ health. This is the case in Scotland, where physical education is located in a prioritised cross-curricular area of Health and Wellbeing (HWB). However, there is a lack of evidence on the extent to which physical education contributes to pupils’ HWB under the new curric...

This paper reports on the findings of two studies concerned with pupils’ motivational and emotional responses to pedagogies of affect in physical education in Scottish secondary schools. Pedagogies of affect explicitly focus on learning in the affective domain, or what is known in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) as ‘personal qualities’....

Given the rapid growing number of the ageing population worldwide, it has been questioned how health and wellbeing in old age can be improved, especially for women in socially vulnerable contexts. Research have shown that social aspects are key determinants for older-age groups’ engagement in an active life. It is crucial to understand older people...

The Academia da Saúde programme has been considered an important health promotion strategy in the scope of primary health care in Brazil. However, there is little evidence on what and how professional practices have been developed as a means to enact health promotion processes in the programme. The study´s purpose was to analyse the health promotio...

Objective This study explored whether pupils’ state body satisfaction during physical education related to the degree to which they indicated that physical education stimulated them to engage in sports activities outside of school. It also investigated whether pupils’ self-determined motivation mediated this relationship, such that pupils with high...

BACKGROUND Significant proportions of young people experience body dissatisfaction, which has implications for psychological and physical well‐being. Lesson content and perceived competence may be important variables for the experience of body dissatisfaction, yet these have been underexplored in physical education. The aim of this cross‐sectional...

Physical education (PE) has a firmly established place in Scottish schools. While there is much to celebrate, evidencing pupil learning, the professional socialization of teachers, and the risk of motor development delay in the early years of schooling are among a range of factors that suggest redesign is warranted. The national Curriculum for Exce...

De un tiempo a esta parte parece que la educación ha perdido el sentido transformador que, desde diversas posiciones, se le había asignado. Sin embargo, las crisis que azotan nuestras sociedades exigen de esfuerzos variados y contundentes, algo que la escuela está en disposición de ofrecer. La función transformadora de la educación concierne igualm...

While there are numerous pedagogical innovations and varying forms of professional learning to support change, teachers rarely move beyond the initial implementation of new ideas and policies and few innovations reach the institutionalized stage. Building on both site ontologies and situated learning in communities of practice perspectives, this pa...

Background: According to the classroom ecology paradigm, teachers and students interpret, predict, and respond to each other repeatedly in a reciprocal way. Such a reciprocal relationship is reflected in bidirectional interactions between a teacher's behavior and student (dis)engagement, an issue that has been confirmed in longitudinal studies incl...

There is widespread consensus on the need for assessment for learning (AfL) in both university courses and school programmes. Given the prevalence of traditional practices in school physical education where assessment is basic or non-existent, we might ask whether AfL is present in physical education teacher education (PETE) courses. Where it is, w...

This paper examines teachers' use of printed curriculum materials (PCM) during physical education (PE) instruction in Spanish secondary schools and the role they play in the enacted curriculum and in the construction of pedagogical knowledge. Three hundred and ten participants (mean age: 37.7 +/- 8.7) responded to an interview-questionnaire on teac...

Overviews issues with respect to the health of the athletic family.

During the past decades, significant progress has been made in the development of physical education and sport pedagogy (PESP) research with the field reaching a level of maturity and critical mass. In light of this development, it seems worthwhile to take an overarching view on existing evidence in order to identify a number of emerging challenges...

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to the process of writing for publication in Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, where three issues in particular are analyzed. The first one explains how to write an article for an international scientific publication, drawing the attention that it must be in accordance to the aims and t...

Research suggests that girls are disengaged in physical education due to the ‘traditional’ way that it is taught, i.e. teacher-centred approaches with a primary focus on motor performance. In contrast, Cooperative Learning, a student-centred pedagogy focusing on learning in multiple domains, has had success in engaging girls in physical education....

This paper was developed at the request of the Organising Committee for the 27th Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation International Conference, in Melbourne, 2013. Its genesis was as a feature forum, wherein a panel of curriculum experts were bought together to discuss the emergence of the Australian Health and Physical...

This paper explores the legacy of Dr Fritz Duras in order to address the issue of whether the implementation of a new curriculum for health and physical education in Australia represents a defining time for the subject. Dr Duras was Director of the first physical education teacher education course at the University of Melbourne during an earlier de...

While e-support has been positioned as a means, to overcome some of the time and financial constraints to professional learning, it has largely failed to act as a medium for professional learning in physical education. Consequently, this paper positions teachers prior interest with social media acts as a type of ‘leverage’ for using sites such as F...

Learners are central to the coaching process, yet elementary-aged (i.e. 5–11 years) children’s perspectives and experiences of sport are under-represented in the current sports coaching literature. One reason that research with these populations may not be forthcoming in these sporting contexts could be due to the employment of research methods. Th...

This lecture considers how it might be possible to make a career as a university scholar at a time when the university is becoming increasingly corporatised. Consistent with the intent of the Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (PESP) Special Interest Group (SIG) Scholar Lecture, I draw on personal experiences from my own career as a university t...

There has been growing interest in alternative assessment strategies that focus on student participation within higher education over the past 20 years. At the same time, it is important to note that there is very little published research dealing with alternative forms of assessment in the field of physical education teacher education (PETE). In t...

Overviews how sport education curriculum model can be used to promote ethical practice in physical education and youth sport settings.

Practitioner inquiry has been offered as a meaningful and sustainable form of professional learning for a number of decades. However, in the context of physical education it has been recently argued that this is still underdeveloped and is far from being embedded into physical education teachers' practice. Time within the busyness of schools for an...

Assessment is one of the most fraught and troublesome issues physical educators have had to deal with over the past 40 years or so. In light of the challenges this situation presents, in this paper we provide an overview of the international literature on assessment in school physical education. We give an account of both traditional and alternativ...

Assessment is an integral feature of the work of all Higher Education institutions. It is, moreover, a process that makes transparent the power relations and hierarchical structures that are part of the fabric of academic fields and disciplines. The importance of assessment as a high stakes practice is increasingly being recognised, with a movement...

A review of the research literature (methodological and substantive) of the sociological aspects of talent development.

During the last 30 years several theories of motivation have generated insights into the motives underlying learners’ behavior in physical education. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a general theory on social development and motivation, has enjoyed increasing popularity in physical education research during the past decade. SDT states that for stu...

The experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalised in academic research to date and little research has examined the formative sporting experiences of female spectators. This article draws on 51 semi-structured interviews with three generations of female fans of one (men's) professional football club (Leicester City), to consider...

The purpose of this paper is to consider four pedagogical applications within the Sport Education model to examine the ways in which a young person can become a literate sports person and develop ethical behaviour through engagement in physical education and youth sport. Through a systematic review of the Sport Education research literature we pres...

The purpose of this advocacy paper is to make a case for the development of a pedagogical model for Health-Based Physical Education (HBPE) drawing on Jewett, Bain and Ennis's (1995) and Metzler's (2005) ground-breaking work on models-based practice in physical education. A selective review of what has been learnt about HBPE was made to be able to d...

School-community partnerships have shown their potential as incubators for innovations and for contributing to comprehensive physical activity (PA) programs. However, implementation frameworks for school-community partnerships that allow local tailoring of PA programs remain scarce. The present paper aims at documenting the composition of a framewo...

This paper examines how teachers select printed curriculum materials in PE in Spanish secondary schools through Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device. The sample recruited were 310 secondary school PE teachers (210 male and 100 female) belonging to the Valencian community in Spain. The mean age of participants was 37.7 (SD 8.7) and the average...

This study examined several qualities related to good citizenship in 669 British students (mean age = 16.7 years; range 15 - 19) and asked whether these differ for males and females. Qualities explored in this research included; civic participation in the form of volunteering, social and personal values, personal qualities, leadership skills and de...

The promotion of an active lifestyle is one of the central aims of physical education (PE). The present study aimed at investigating the relation between students’ motivation for PE and activity levels using self-determination theory as a guiding framework. A retrospective design was used involving 2617 university students, of which 878 (33.5 perce...

0022-0272 We comment critically on the notion that teachers can experience ownership of curriculum change. The evidence base for this commentary is our work on two curriculum development projects in health and physical education between 1993 and 1998. Applying a theoretical framework adapted from Bernstein's writing on the social construction of pe...

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El propósito de este trabajo es examinar las tendencias actuales y futuras en la investigación en educación física en Europa. Mi punto de partida es la afirmación de la importancia vital y la pertinencia de la investigación en educación física y el por qué la investigación es importante para la educación física. Para alcanzar ese objetivo, he revis...

0261-4367 It has long been recognised that family is an important arena in which sporting tastes and interests are nurtured. Indeed, for many young people the family introduces them to and then provides ongoing support for engaging in sport. Research has also indicated that the family has a significant position in the lives of young disabled people...

02671522 This academic review critically examines the theoretical and empirical bases of claims made for the educational benefits of physical education and school sport (PESS). An historical overview of the development of PESS points to the origins of claims made in four broad domains: physical, social, affective and cognitive. Analysis of the evid...

This paper reports on a 16-week sport education (SE) unit with just over 70 year 5 students (M age = 10.04 years) in one United Kingdom school during the spring and summer terms and discusses students' SE experiences. Student interviews were conducted throughout the season and a questionnaire on different motivation aspects was administered prior t...

This paper draws on a study of female and male adolescents' social constructions of the body and self-identity in and around physical education lessons. The concepts of the social construction of the body and embodied self-identity are discussed and related to popular physical culture in Australia. Data from a two year study in Australian secondary...

1356-336X Despite receiving an unprecedented level of government funding to ensure young people have two hours of high quality physical education (PE) and sport, physical educators in the UK continue to decry poor motivation levels and disengaged youth in PE. The major purpose of this paper is to achieve a greater understanding of the factors that...

0273-5024 In this article, we were interested in how young people learn to play games within a tactical games model (TGM) approach (Griffin, Oslin, & Mitchell, 1997) in terms of the physical-perceptual and social-interactive dimensions of situativity. Kirk and MacPhail’s (2002) development of the Bunker-Thorpe TGfU model was used to conceptualize t...

02735024 In this article, we were interested in how young people learn to play games within a tactical games model (TGM) approach (Griffin, Oslin, & Mitchell, 1997) in terms of the physical-perceptual and social-interactive dimensions of situativity. Kirk and MacPhail’s (2002) development of the Bunker-Thorpe TGfU model was used to conceptualize th...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an 8-week body-focused physical and health education module on self-objectification and social physique anxiety (SPA) in a sample of 85 Irish schoolgirls. Classrooms were randomly assigned to receive the experimental module or the standard curriculum. Participants completed pre- and postassess...

The first interactions between teachers and pupils in physical education often take place in the changing rooms, and, as such, the changing rooms are a useful place to begin an exploration of the processes and practices of negotiation in physical education. Pupils are generally required to change their clothing for physical education lessons, an ac...

Resumen: Desde la década de 1880 hasta el presente, la escuela ha institucionalizado prácticas centradas en la regulación y normalización del cuerpo. Para Ilustrar y elaborar este argumento trataré de mostrar cómo se regularon los cuerpos en las coordenadas de tiempo y espacio en las escuelas inglesas y australianas entre mediados y finales del S.X...

According to Kirk (1998) (following Foucault) a shift in corporeal power has been underway since the late 18th century in many ‘western’ countries, from an external form of power and locus of control to an internal form and locus. In light of the increased volume of discourse around the alleged obesity crisis (Gard & Wright 2005) we revisit and att...

I argue in this paper that sport should be retained as an important part of the educational rationale for physical education. I consider Siedentop’s critique of physical education and his alternative in the form of Sport Education. Siedentop’s goals for youth sport and physical education and use of the work of Alisdair McIntyre are explored. It is...

The article builds on a number of recent critical reviews to argue that claims that we are experiencing an obesity crisis are almost entirely without foundation. The possibility is explored that this crisis is manufactured through a complex process of the social production of knowledge. The article marshals evidence to challenge the basis upon whic...

What is the current condition of the field of physical education? How has it adapted to the rise of kinesiology, sport and exercise science and human movement studies over the last thirty years? This Handbook provides an authoritative critical overview of the field and identifies future challenges and directions. The Handbook is divided in to six p...

It can be argued that young people’s socialisation into sport follows a general pattern of sampling, specialising and investing (Côté & Hay, 2002a). In the sampling phase children participate in a range of sports for fun and enjoyment. The specialising phase involves more sport-specific skill development and a reduction in the range of sport activi...

The PESSCLS strategy for physical education and youth sport in England has received an unprecedented level of funding from the Blair government during its term in office. In this article, it is proposed that there are structural problems with the delivery of physical education and school sport in England that the PESSCLS strategy and associated pol...

Teacher beliefs are a major influence on teacher actions. Because context influences beliefs, it was the purpose of this study to explore teachers' beliefs about Mosston's Spectrum of Teaching Styles from an international perspective. Over 1,400 teachers from 7 countries completed a survey related to their self-reported use of and beliefs about var...

It is commonplace for politicians and the media to refer to elite sport as a means of framing discussions about physical education. This point is demonstrated by reference to recent policy documents and media reports containing statements by Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell. Their collective perspective is labelled the commonsense consensus on physical...

The development of feelings of identity, the sense of belonging to a team, and the growth of social skills are experiences that sport, if properly conducted, is well placed to offer (Siedentop, 1994). Evidence suggests that some characteristics of traditional, multiactivity forms of physical education work against realizing these goals (Locke, 1992...

This paper explores young people's (9 to 15 years old) early socialisation into sport. We draw on data from an 18-month-long ethnography of the junior section of an athletics club in England, using field notes, interviews and a psychometric questionnaire. We begin by noting a trend towards increasing numbers of younger children participating in adu...

This article explores a class of Grade 5 (age 9 and 10) children’s conceptions of sport during a season of sport education at Forest Gate Primary School. The purpose, following Kirk and Kinchin (this issue), is to examine the extent to which the potential transfer of learning between school and sport as a community of practice may be possible throu...

The article seeks to establish the usefulness of situated learning theory as a means of thinking differently about the alleged abstraction of school learning in a range of subjects including physical education, and the issue of transfer of learning. Following a discussion of Lave and Wenger’s notion of situated learning as legitimate peripheral par...

This paper begins to develop the concept of gender-relevant physical education, combining the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of the habitus and feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young's analysis of feminine motility. It draws on data generated from a study of young people's articulation of the relationships between muscularity, physicality a...

In this article, Hayley Fitzgerald, Anne Jobling and David Kirk consider the physical education and sporting experiences of a group of students with severe learning difficulties. Their study is thought provoking, not only because of the important and somewhat neglected subject matter, but equally for the research approach adopted. The way in which...

This article uses the concept of social positioning to explore the construction of a youth sports club by young people, their parents and coaches. The year-long ethnography of Forest Athletics Club (FAC) identified two athlete positions of Samplers and Beginning Specializers. Four parents’ positions were identified, those of Non-Attenders, Spectato...

This article reports on a study that accepts the proposal that we listento the voices of young people in relation to sport and physical recreation.The study sought the advice of young sports leaders on what can be done to facilitate young people’s involvement in sport. The study used group interviews (Nominal Group Technique) with over 600 14–18-ye...

This paper draws on a TGFU approach to junior high school basketball to develop a situated perspective on student learning. The paper offers an interpretation of student learning from a situated learning perspective. Analysis of 3 critical incidents expressed as vignettes focuses on the perceptual-physical, social-interactive and institutional-cult...

This article will report on the process of student-led research as an innovative pedagogical technique for learning more about the physical education (PE) and sporting experiences of young disabled people. The article draws on work from two school based curriculum projects that sought to work with young people in an empowering manner. We argue that...

The Millennium Volunteers (MV) is a nation-wide government initiative designed to encourage citizenship in young people by providing opportunities to volunteer their time in the community for the benefit of themselves and others. This paper examines an MV programme focused solely on sport that sets out to provide training and support for young spor...

Current debates about educational theory are concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power and thereby issues such as who possesses a truth and how have they arrived at it, what questions are important to ask, and how should they best be answered. As such, these debates revolve around questions of preferred, appropriate, and useful th...

This paper presents an interpretation of student learning from a situated learning perspective, seeking to enhance approaches already employed in teaching games for understanding (TGfU) research. The analysis was designed to help identify three specific dimensions of situated learning in physical education: the perceptual-physical, social-interacti...

0273-5024 Bunker and Thorpe first proposed Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) in 1982 as an alternative to traditional, technique-led approaches to games teaching and learning. Despite interest from teachers and researchers, there has been no attempt to review the TGfU model. This is an oversight, given the important advances in educational le...

Using mainly historical material fromAustralia, the paper seeks to understand earlyforms of school physical training, sport andmedical inspection as specialised means ofschooling bodies. The study adopts a socialepistemological perspective in seeking tounderstand the meaning-in-use of notions suchas physical training. It explores the socialconseque...

The focus of this paper is the social construction of physical education teacher education (PETE) and its fate within the broader process of curriculum change in the physical activity field. Our task is to map the dimensions of a research program centered on the social construction of the physical activity field and PETE in higher education. Debate...

Wacquant (1995) argues that the irony of the body's increasing visibility in the social science literature is the absence of studies that deal with actual flesh and blood bodies. Focused on an elite, independent high school in Australia this paper examines the relationship between young men's experiences of rugby training and the embodiment of a 't...