MEASURING THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS ’ PERCEPTIONS OF PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION AND SPORTS TEACHERS ’ PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL COMPETENCES

The purpose of the study was to explore the possibility of creating a valid and reliable model and instrument for measuring physical and health education teachers’ competences in classroom education process, perceived from the perspective of secondary schools students. Also, the goal was to explore to what extent official legislative documents as well as official curriculum of the Faculty of sport, health and physical education in Sarajevo represent a sufficient background for creating such a measuring instrument with satisfactory metric characteristics. The sample in this study were N=831 students from fourteen secondary shools in the urban parts of Sarajevo. The students attended third (N=422 or 50.8%) and fourth class (N=409 or 49.2%) at the time of the research. There were N=452 (54.4%) females and N=379 (45.6%) males in this sample, both aged from sixteen to eighteen. An analysis of legislative documents and the official curriculum was conducted by a group of education experts in order to establish the indicators of psysical and health education teachers’ competences and to design an instrument to register and measure these competences. Finally, a 28-item Teachers’ Competences Perception Questionnaire was constructed (TCPQ)and applied on the given sample. The results of Exploratory and Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the questionnaire measured five distinct and correlated factors and they are (1) teaching competences, (2) communication and empathy, (3) health care instruction, (4) pedagogical competences and (5) physical appearance of a teacher; these five factors explained 57.726% of total variance indicating a solid factor structure of the instrument. Oblimin rotation also yielded a meaningful factor solution following the frame of the Curriculum and Legislative documents’ content related to physical, health and sports teachers’ competences. Reliability analysis showed satisfactory reliability of the most of the factor scales. Implications for the use of the questionnaire on the students’ populations, as well as the possibilities for further instrument development and curriculum modification are stated on the account of the research results.