A one-year intervention in 7th grade physical education classes aiming to change motivational climate and attitudes towards exercise

Objectives: To assess the effects of a year-long intervention in Greek junior high school physical education on motivational climate, goal orientations and attitudes towards exercise and healthy diet. Design: One-year pre-post experimental trial. Method: Eighty-eight daily lessons aiming to facilitate task-involvement were developed with 262 students in an intervention group and 521 acting as controls. All were at the first year of junior high school (7th grade). The intervention was assessed through questionnaires at the beginning and end of the school year and 10 months after the end of the intervention. Participants completed the measures of motivational climate, goal orientations and attitudes. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses, and reliability and correlation analyses, supported the psychometric properties of the questionnaires. Covariance analysis results revealed that, after adjusting for initial differences on the assessed constructs, students who took part in the intervention, compared with the control group: (1) had more positive attitudes towards exercise and healthy eating, (2) had lower ego and higher task orientation scores, and (3) perceived that their teacher gave more emphasis on task-involvement and less emphasis on ego-involvement. Conclusions: Physical educators can create a positive motivational climate facilitating students’ task orientation and attitudes towards exercise.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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