earticle

영어

In the 7th national curricula, physical education is one of required courses for high school sophomores, but a lot of high schools have decided not to teach juniors and seniors physical education since that is an elective for them. That situation results in cutting down on regular school hours for that class on the whole.
Physical education activities are physical activities by which students seek pleasure. They find it delightful to get exercise, and they do that voluntarily without being forced by others. Physical education allows them to build up character and cooperative spirits, and to learn to act together with one another. That is the basis of character education and steps up ego-identity building.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of physical education activities on the self-concept of high school students.
The subjects in this study were 39 sophomores and 39 juniors in S high school located in the city of Sanbon. They took a pretest in self- concept, and the experimental group composed of the sophomores were engaged in physical education activities during normal classroom hours for that subject for a three-month period of time from April 4 through May 30, 2008. The activities were carried out twice a week. The juniors who were selected as a control group were enrolled in a class that didn't choose physical education, and no formal physical education activities were provided to them. After the experiment was completed, a survey was conducted on both groups to find out their self-concept.
The instrument used to determine the effect of the physical education activities on self-concept was Jeon Weon-sik(1968)'s Self-Concept Inventory, which was modified to suit the purpose of the study.
The collected data were analyzed with SPSS program. To check into the educational effect of the physical education activities on their self- concept, the pretest data of the two groups were compared before the experiment was implemented. After the experiment was finished, paired t-test was carried out to compare their pretest and posttest data to see how much improvement there was in their self-concept.
The findings of the study were as follows:
Being involved in the physical education activities had a positive effect on the self-concept of the high schoolers.
In the pretest, the experimental group lagged behind the control group in every part of self-concept that included physical self, moral self, personality self, home self, social self, evaluation of the self and positive self-concept. Overall, however, the former made progress to greater or lesser extents in self-concept in the posttest.
According to the results of t-test, the experimental group especially showed a significant improvement in moral self-concept at the p<.001 level of significance, compared to that of the control group. In terms of personality self-concept, the results of t-test also showed a significant disparity between that and the control group at the p<.01 level of significance. The findings indicated that the physical education activities encouraged them to understand and receive themselves, to open themselves as they were, to build the right values, to have a positive mind-set, to bolster their self-esteem, and eventually to take a more active attitude toward school life.