"Teach us first, so we could teach the children": Kindergarten teachers' perceptions from PA REALITY intervention mapping study
Refereed conference paper presented and published in conference proceedings
CUHK Authors
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AbstractPhysical development and health in early childhood are important for establishing the foundations and patterns of movement behaviors, that will in turn benefit an individual’s physical activity and health in later stages of life. However, physical education is not part of the kindergarten education curriculum in Hong Kong (HK). As an exercise of needs assessment using intervention mapping¹, we investigated the state of physical education in HK kindergartens, with the objective to systematically develop and implement a tailored school-home intervention for enhancing the teaching of preschool children’s physical activity and fundamental movement skills. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four in-service administrators and nine teachers from four kindergartens with varying physical environments and curriculum approaches. Recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a hybrid of inductive and deductive thematic analyses. Three themes were identified: Lack of training for teachers at their in-service and pre-service stages, limited assessment guidelines for preschool children’s fundamental movement skills, and low priority for physical education in kindergartens and families. Our results suggested that teachers are facing personal and environmental barriers towards quality physical education. At the individual level, they perceived low self-efficacy in pedagogical and teaching skills due to the gap between pre-service theoretical training and practical teaching. At the environmental level, teachers felt that instruction and assessment guidelines for structured physical education were unavailable. Further, children received inadequate parental support in relation to their physical development. Based on results from the interviews, we identified social cognitive theory (SCT)² as an appropriate framework for intervention design and delivery. Within SCT, personal, environmental and behavioral factors are interactive elements within a reciprocal process of learning and behavior change. Our results suggest that personal and environmental barriers in-service kindergarten teachers face could limit their teaching effectiveness in physical domains. As such, future interventions should provide specific, targeted strategies to support teachers in overcoming these challenges. For example, immersion of physical activity games, standardizing assessment training, and engaging parents in regular parent-child co-physical activity. These key intervention concepts will be applied in the project titled Physical Activity Routines, Education, Assessment, Literacy, and Information Technology application in Young children (PA REALITY).
All Author(s) ListHa AS, Zeng T, Chan CHS, Ng JYY
Name of ConferenceAIESEP International Conference
Start Date of Conference13/05/2024
End Date of Conference17/05/2024
Place of ConferenceJyväskylä
Country/Region of ConferenceFinland
Year2024
Month5
LanguagesEnglish-United Kingdom
