Physical Education classes, sports motivation and adolescence: study of some moderating variables

Abstract

Adolescence is considered a stage in which there are high rates of sports drop out, and this evidence justifies the need to study those factors that may affect this fact. Importance and Utility of Physical Education Perception (IUPEP) is shown in the literature as a factor to consider when studying this phenomenon, and seems to be affected by the Sport Motivation (SM) of young people. Although the relationship between these two constructs has been studied, it has not been the moderating role that other constructs such as the Professor Learning Climate (PLC) or Student Learning Orientation (SLO) can have in this relationship. The present study analyzes the relationship between IUPEP and SM, as well as the moderating role of PLC and SLO in this relationship. This analyses was performed using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013), designed for testing the moderation by directly assessing the significance of the indirect effect of the independent variable (X; SM) on the dependent variable (Y; IUPEP) through two moderators: PLC (M) and SLO (W). The study was carried out with 267 adolescents from eight classes of public centers in Valencia, aged between 11 and 18 years (mean = 14.04 ± 1.64), 52.8% male. The results suggest that Sports Motivation explains 21% of the Importance and Utility of Physical Education Perception, and, in addition, a moderating role of Professor Learning Climate and Student Learning Orientation in this relationship is observed.