Browsing by Author "Huotari, Noora"

Tiivistelmä - Referat – Abstract The aim of this study was to determine what views and experiences teachers involved in physical education in the Finnish comprehensive school system have regarding the changes in the National core curriculum (2014) within physical education. Furthermore, the aim was also to enhance the understanding of the connection between sports and improvement of fundamental movement skills. The research questions arose from my Bachelor´s thesis, in which I, by analyzing the content of physical education lessons, studied physical exercise and fundamental movement skills using the Gallahuen and Donnely (2003) classification system. The main theory used in this research is the National core curriculum (POPS 2014) and the review of POPS 2014 as a tool for analyzing the results of this study. At this point, not many studies have been conducted about POPS 2014. However, current results indicate that separating learning of fundamental movement skills and sports in POPS 2014 has caused some issues. This is a qualitative study. The research material is based on five interviews with teachers from the physical education field. Questions were based on subjects from my Bachelor´s thesis that needed further understanding. Phenomenographic analysis and theoretical content analysis were used to analyze the interviews. The research material was divided into two groups: Physical education teachers´ views on the core curriculum, and sports as a mean to enhance fundamental movement skills. The results indicate that all the teachers had a clear picture of the changes to the core curriculum in POPS 2014. All teachers were of the same opinion, that changes had occurred especially in the guidelines of teaching physical ability. Only one interviewee stated that the changes have had, to a certain degree, a negative outcome. Results from this study indicate that teachers are using a variety of sports to enhance fundamental movement skills of students. However, teachers’ knowledge about fundamental movement skills showed to be lacking more than expected.