A social work study on quality on quality of physical education programs in primary schools: A case study of governmental and non-for-profit schools in city of Esfahan, Iran

Article history: Received October 5, 2012 Received in revised format 20 January 2013 Accepted 22 January 2013 Available online January 22 2013 Physical education is one of the most important parts of schoolchildren studies and it could influence of social and academic performance of children, significantly. This paper studies physical education among schoolchildren who attend elementary schools in city of Esfahan, Iran over for the educational calendar of 2010-2011. The study selects 52 schools as sample, 18 non-for-profit and 34 governmental schools and half of them belong to female students. The results of this study indicate that physical education has a somewhat better quality in non-forprofit educational system compared with governmental ones although this difference is not statistically significance (P<0.05). In our survey, ten percent of time, physical education was performed poorly, twenty five percent was in average condition, forty eight percent was in good condition and seventeen percent was in excellent condition. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Physical education is one of the most important parts of schoolchildren studies and it could influence of social and academic performance of children, significantly.There are many studies associated with the relationship between physical activities and other issues such as educational performance, social activities, etc. (Subramaniam & Silverman, 2007;Chedzoy & Burden, 2009;Rasberry et al., 2011).Lack of physical activities could cause some deceases such as obesity (Fernandes & Sturm, 2010).According to van Beurden et al. (2003), Physical education (PE) lessons are an ideal setting to improve child fundamental movement skills (FMSs) and improve physical activity (PA) for optimal health.Hastie and Saunders (1991) investigated the accountability in secondary school physical education.They proposed a model to examine the interrelationships among the variables related to accountability, namely, active instruction, monitoring, and the rewards system operating in classes.
They tested their model using Linear Structural Relations and confirmed that the accountability factors of monitoring directly influenced involvement while active instruction and the rewards system impacted involvement indirectly through the students' valuing of the teacher.van Beurden et al. (2003) discussed whether we could skill and activate children through primary school physical education lessons.Their results provided some preliminary evidence for the reliability and validity of measures derived from some tripartite efficacy instruments, and supported their implementation in future research designed to examine physical education engagement.Rengasamy (2012) performed a physical fitness intervention program within a physical education class on selected health-related fitness among Malaysian secondary school girls.Their results indicated that a ten-week physical fitness program within a physical education class had been effective in enhancing cardiovascular endurance and flexibility.Theodosiou and Papaioannou (2006) investigated motivational climate, achievement objectives and metacognitive activity in physical education and exercise involvement in out-of-school settings.Their findings underscored the importance of task orientation and mastery climate for the development of metacognition in physical education and underlined the necessary of research on the causal relationship between metacognition and sport involvement.
According to Cox et al. (2008), the efficacy of school-based physical activity interventions, within and outside of school, was linked to the degree of support for students' self-determined motivation.Katartzi and Vlachopoulos (2011) investigated motivating children with developmental coordination disorder in school physical education.Dudley et al. (2012) determined the levels of physical activity (PA), lesson context and teacher interaction students receive during physical education (PE) in secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia.They explained that levels of skill instruction and practice were well below international comparisons and may had implications for PA participation later in life.Aktop and Karahan (2012) examined physical education teacher's self reported view about various teaching methods and Turkish physical education curriculum and to study the gender differences in selecting the teaching methods and reported that there was an incongruity between physical education teacher's views, preferences and Turkish physical education Curriculum recommending about teaching methods for physical education classes This paper studies physical education among schoolchildren who attend elementary schools in city of Esfahan, Iran over for the educational calendar of 2010-2011.The study selects 52 schools as sample, 18 non-for-profit and 34 governmental schools and half of them belong to female students.

The proposed study
In this paper, we study physical education among schoolchildren who attend elementary schools in city of Esfahan, Iran over for the educational calendar of 2010-2011.The organization of this paper first presents the proposed study in section 2, while details of our findings are given in section 3 and concluding remarks are given in the last to summarize the contribution of the paper.We use the following formula to calculate the minimum number of sample size, where N is the population size,  When a question receives a point of 31 to 60, the response to that question is considered weak, 61 to 90 is a an average point, 91 to 120 is rated good and finally any number above 120 is considered as an excellent point.Table 2 shows details of our findings about the process of physical education in terms of frequency and percentage.As we can observe from the results of Table 2, nearly half of the participants believed that physical education programs are in good conditions while 22% of the participants believed non-for-profit organizations rated excellent non-for-profit organizations but only 14.71% of the participants gave this ranking to governmental schools.We have analyzed the results based on gender and Table 3 shows details of our survey.The results of Table 3 are similar with Table 2 and we do not see a significant difference between female and male people on this kind of courses.
The proposed study of this paper considers the following three hypotheses.
1.There is a difference between the qualities of physical education programs in schoolchildren in governmental and non-for-profit ones.
2. There is a difference between the qualities of physical education programs in schoolchildren in female's ones compared with male's ones.
3. There is a difference between the qualities of physical education programs in schoolchildren in different regions.

The results
In this section, we present details of our survey on examining the quality of physical education between governmental and non-for-profit schoolchildren.

Quality of teaching in governmental and non-for-profit schools
The first hypothesis of this survey investigates whether there is any difference between governmental and non-for-profit schools.Table 4 demonstrates the results of our survey.According to the results of Table 4, there is no meaningful difference between governmental and nonfor-profit schoolchildren in terms of quality of physical education programs although non-for-profit schools seem to have better performance.

Quality of teaching in governmental and non-for-profit schools
The second hypothesis of this survey investigates whether there is any difference between different types of schoolchildren in terms of gender.Table 5 demonstrates the results of our survey.According to the results of Table 5, there is no meaningful difference between male and female schoolchildren in terms of quality of physical education programs although schools whose students are male seem to have better performance.

Quality of teaching in inside and between different regions
The third hypothesis of this survey investigates whether there is any difference between different regions of schoolchildren in terms of gender.Table 6 demonstrates the results of our survey.According to the results of Table 6, there are some differences for the quality of physical education programs but these differences are not statistically significance.

Conclusion
This paper investigated physical education among schoolchildren who attend elementary schools in city of Esfahan, Iran over for the educational calendar of 2010-2011.The study selected 52 schools as sample, 18 non-for-profit and 34 governmental schools and half of them belong to female students.
The results of this study indicated that physical education had somewhat better quality in non-forprofit educational system compared with governmental ones although this difference was not statistically significance (P<0.05).In other words, there was no meaningful difference between governmental and non-for-profit schoolchildren in terms of quality of physical education programs although non-for-profit schools seem to have better performance.In addition, there is no meaningful difference between male and female schoolchildren in terms of quality of physical education programs although schools whose students are male seem to have better performance.Finally, there are some differences for the quality of physical education programs but these differences are not statistically significance.
of normal distribution and finally ε is the error term.Since we have 96 N=557, the number of sample size is calculated as n=52.The society has been divided into five regions and Table 1 demonstrates details of our sample size.We designed a questionnaire with 26 questions covering physical education characteristics covering what participants believe about the quality and quantity of various courses.All questions were designed in Likert scale from one to five, where one represents a weak and five represents strong point.

Table 3
Details of our findings on performance of physical education programs in terms of their gender

Table 4
The results of the survey of the quality of physical education in different kinds of schools

Table 5
The results of the survey of the quality of physical education in different kinds of schools

Table 6
The results of the survey of the quality of physical education in different regions