MOTOR SKILLS DEVELOPMENT ALTERATIONS OF PRE-SCHOOL AGED CHILDREN IN RELATION TO QUALIFICATION OF EDUCATORS

The aim of this study was to investigate motor skills development of 5-6-year-aged children in relation to educator's qualification. The participants were 16 boys and 14 girls of the pre-school groups in the kindergarten. Two teachers (both females over 50 years of age) were giving their usual physical education (PE) lessons (45 min x twice a week) during the study period. Teacher of group 1 (G1; n=15) had a qualification of a general educator, and had other educational activities and duties with her group. Teacher of group 2 (G2; n=15) was a specialist of PE and had PE lessons for kids, only. The motor skills development was tested at baseline (T1) and repeated after six months (T2). To investigate children motor skill development, the battery of the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 (TGMD2) was used. The testings were filmed using a digital camera for a later evaluation analysis. All testing and evaluation procedures were performed by the same exercise expert. The intra- and inter- group differences were performed using t-test where testing occasion (T1, T2) was considered as a dependent variable, and group (G1, G2) – as an independent variable. The percent analysis was used in evaluating the performance of motor skills development tasks. Over the six month course significant and greater improvements were observed in running and object catching skills in children who had PE educator classes comparing to those who had PE classes of a general educator (p<0.05). A tendency of significant changes to be achieved in the skills such as kicking and throwing an object was also observed in G2 (p=0.06-0.07). We may conclude that the impact of an educator, specialized in PE, for improvement of locomotive and non-locomotive motor skills development of children is greater than that of a general educator of kindergarten kids.