Development and Validation of a Physical Literacy Knowledge Questionnaire for Physical Education Teachers

Abstract

Physical literacy (PL) provides kids with the movement skills they need to engage in physical exercise for the rest of their lives. Internationally, there is no psychometrically validated questionnaire to measure the PL knowledge level of the teachers and coaches working with children. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to design a physical literacy knowledge questionnaire that satisfied acceptable psychometric criteria of validity and reliability. With ethics committee approval, 336 participants from three groups (Physical Education (PE) teachers, n = 170; university academic staff, n = 6; and undergraduate PE students, n = 160) were recruited for this study using convenient sampling. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were tested with Cronbach’s alpha using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 23. The Physical Literacy Knowledge Questionnaire is a 3-point Likert-scale survey consisting of 40 items. The Cronbach’s alpha test conducted shows that the university academic staff scored 0.746 (moderate level), PE teachers scored 0.611 (moderate level), and undergraduate PE students scored 0.773 (high degree of correlation) for the items in the instruments. The findings of this study indicate that the questionnaire was suitably valid and reliable to determine the physical literacy knowledge of Sri Lankan physical education teachers.