Students’ motivation in a disc golf-lesson and a soccer-lesson: An experimental study in the Physical Education setting

Sammendrag

The purpose of physical education (PE) in both Norway and Denmark is that PE should inspire to a lifelong active lifestyle. Based on the self-determination theory, the aim of the present study was to compare students’ intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and perceived competence in a lifestyle sport inspired PE-lesson (disc golf) to a traditional PE-lesson (soccer) and general PE. In addition, we aimed to investigate whether differences in motivation and perceived competence was conditional of the students´ relative attitude toward PE. The result of the study revealed that perceived competence was higher in the disc golf-lesson compared to the soccer-lesson and general PE. No overall differences in intrinsic motivation were found. However, when investigating differences in intrinsic motivation according to the students´ relative attitude toward PE, the results indicated that the students with a negative attitude toward PE was significantly more intrinsically motivated in disc golf-lesson compared to soccer-lesson and general PE.  The findings may be seen as preliminary recommendations to physical educators to vary the activity choices in physical education classes.