Assessment of pupils’ physical activity during diverse types of teaching lessons

Abstract

This paper focuses on the physical activity of pupils of early school age during different types of school lessons, i.e. 45 minutes – a frontal teaching lesson, a physical education lesson, and an integrated fieldwork education (IFE) lesson. In the research, we analysed each method of teaching in terms of the number of steps the pupils made and their metabolic rate in MET units. The minor aim was to verify the use of ActiGraph accelerometers by teachers at schools and to provide basic information about the devices to the potential users.The physical education class had the highest volume of movement – 1,202 steps in 45 minutes. However, the IFE with 1,118 steps in 45 minutes may be compared to a class of physical education in terms of the number of steps. The weakest in terms of the steps made and the amount of physical activity was a habitual education class, where students walked an average of 218 steps in 45 minutes. We also tried to find out the intensity of the physical load of pupils of early school age. Again, the physically most demanding form of teaching was the physical education lesson, during which pupils achieved medium physical load above 3 MET. For integrated fieldwork education, the metabolic output was below 3 MET, namely 2.63. The lesson of habitual teaching was characterized by a low-intensity motoric load of 1.81 MET.

Strengthening Pupils’ Physical Activity through Outdoor Education

“…These researches, however, consisted of a measurement of the number of steps in different activities which are typical for integrated outdoor education. Later, the step count and MET rate has been gauged by Trávníček, Svobodová, and Durna (2018) on school aged children during different types of learning lessons.…”