An assessment of the effects of a college aide program on selected motor skills of second and fifth graders

Abstract

Little research has been reported which has assessed the motor skills of children in elementary classroom situations where teacher aides have been involved in the teaching of physical education activities. The purpose of this study was to assess selected motor skills of second and fifth grade students and to determine whether the motor skills of students in classes with college aides differed significantly from the motor skills of students in classes without college aides. The children were tested on the motor skills of throwing, catching, kicking, and striking.

The study was conducted over a fourteen week period of time in elementary schools located in Mercer County, West Virginia. Four hundred forty nine children participated in the study. All of the children were pre tested using an adapted form of the Ohio State University Scale of Intra-Gross Motor Assessment (1975) on the four motor skills during the first two weeks of the study. A ten week instructional period then followed for the experimental groups on each grade level, utilizing aides from an elementary physical education methods class at Concord College, located in Athens, West Virginia. The assigned college aide assisted the classroom teachers in conducting physical education activities with the experimental classes four days each week for the ten week period. The control group experienced. their regular instructional period for the interim ten week period, having the classroom teacher being solely responsible for conducting the physical education activities four days each week. Both groups received their regularly scheduled instruction from a physical education specialist one class period each week. At the completion of the ten week instructional period, all of the subjects were post tested utilizing the same instrument which was used in the pretest.

A two way factorial MANOVA was applied in order to determine statistically significant differences in motor skill with respect to experimental versus control group, second and fifth grades and the interaction between them. The results indicated that there was a nonsignificant interaction between grades and experimental versus control group. Therefore, the two groups were relatively constant across the two grades. The results indicated that the classes of students with college aides scored significantly higher on the motor skills of catching, kicking, and striking, while there was no significant difference on the skill of throwing from pretest to posttest. The older children (fifth graders) scored significantly higher on the two skills of catching and kicking than did the younger children (second graders). There was no significant difference from pretest to posttest with respect to the grades on the motor skills of throwing and striking.