How do the hours of weekly physical activity influence on cardiorespiratory fitness?: a video- guided scientific inquiry in primary education

(Video as a support for the inquiry process in physical education classrooms)

Abstract

Knowing your body is essential to improve your lifestyle, so it is important to promote healthy habits from childhood, to obtain benefits in adulthood. For this, in the present work a scientific investigation is carried out in order to develop the scientific skills of the students in the upper cycle of primary education from a dynamic of four sessions based on the physical activity of the students. In this study, a didactic strategy has been designed and implemented using the use of video as a support to guide a scientific inquiry that allows studying how weekly physical activity influences the cardiorespiratory capacity of students. To collect the data, a weekly physical activity questionnaire and a test have been carried out to assess the cardiorespiratory capacity of the students. The research results indicate that the videos provide students a structure of the inquiry process and have a positive relationship with the improvement of scientific skills. Specifically, they entail an improvement in the research questions, in the identification of the variables, allowing a better experimental design, as well as the representation of data that generates more elaborate scientific explanations. Likewise, it has been observed that carrying out inquiring activities related to physical activity promotes the interest and curiosity of students towards this discipline.