Does Cardiorespiratory Fitness Knowledge Carry Over in Middle School Students?

Conceptual knowledge development in physical education is critical to helping learners become physically literate. Understanding physical education learners' long-term knowledge development is one of the first steps in designing effective curriculum. Guided by the constructivist learning theory, this study aimed to determining the extent to which the cardiorespiratory fitness knowledge learned in the first year contributed to further knowledge development in the second year. A two-year longitudinal design was adopted to track 716 students' learning documented in their physical education workbook from sixth grade to seventh grade. Canonical correlation and multivariate multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship of learning during the two years. The results showed that student knowledge development in the first year did facilitate their knowledge development in the second year (R c= .54; Wilks' λ= .69, F (9, 1728.1) =30.99, p<.01, η 2 = .31). Specifically, students' three types of knowledge development (descriptive, relational, and reasoning) were all significant contributors (descriptive: Wilks' λ = .96, F (3, 710) =9.34, p<.01, η 2 = .04; relational: Wilks' λ = .98, F (3, 710) =4.44, p<.01, η 2 = .02; reasoning: Wilks' λ = .90, F (3, 710) =26.13, p<.01, η 2 = .10) to their further learning with the knowledge development from the reasoning assignments to be the strongest facilitator. Students' overall learning in the first year significantly contributed to their descriptive (R 2= .12), relational (R 2= .26), and reasoning (R 2= .21) knowledge learning in the second year.