Reference Matrix for Cognitive Evaluation in the Sociocultural Dimension of School Physical Education

Abstract

Historically, the discipline of Physical Education at school had as reference the physical-sports aspects as contents, teaching practices and evaluation of this curricular component. However, the cognitive learning of content in a sociocultural perspective of corporal practices has acquired relevance in teaching and evaluation practices, the latter being both in the classroom context and in the large scale evaluations. Objective: The objective of this study is to develop and validate a reference matrix for a large scale evaluation in the sociocultural dimension of Physical Education in Elementary Education (9th grade). Methodology: The learning objectives of Physical Education in the Basic Education of National Curricular Parameters (Brazil, 1998) were the references for the elaboration of a questionnaire applied to 232 teachers and researchers in Physical Education in Primary Education (6th to 9th year) of the 5 regions of Brazil, with 57.3% masters and doctors and 42.7% graduates and specialists. We performed exploratory factorial analysis using SPSS v.22.0. Results: the results indicated that 1) the study had an adequate sample (KMO = 0.925, BST≤0.01), 2) the 15 items had satisfactory explanation (commonalities ≥0.5), 3) satisfactory total variance explained (71.46% ), 4) 3 factors extracted: a) Educational sport and popular games, b) Sports, fights and gymnastics, and c) Dance; 5) high internal consistency with values above 0.9. Conclusions: It is argued that the elaborated reference matrix can help teachers and researchers in Physical Education in Elementary Education (9th grade) to cognitively evaluate students in relation to content in the sociocultural dimension of body practices.