2001 Volume 46 Issue 4 Pages 365-379
A study was conducted to explore the development of Physical Education learning motives of elementary school children, to classify these motives, and investigate how they are related to learning strategies. A questionnaire designed to assess learning motives and the use of learning strategies in Physical Education learning was administered to 660 5th and 6th graders, and the following results were obtained. Factor analysis revealed 6 factors related to learning motives for Physical Education learning : practice, superiority, approval, fulfillment, group, and performance orientations. The practice and fulfillment orientation scales of the learning motives correlated positively with children's learning strategies, and the superiority and performance orientations scales showed a negative correlation. Moreover, cluster analysis showed that children could be classified into 8 types of learning motives: amotivation, relation dependence, evaluation anxiety, regular, performance-oriented, ego-oriented, task-oriented, and intrinsic-oriented. On the basis of these results, we discuss how to motivate children for Physical Education learning.
