Ecopedagogy in Physical Education, Sports, and Health: Changes in Elementary School Students’ Environmental-Care Attitudes

Abstract

Physical Education, Sports, and Health can provide an experiential setting for linking movement activities with care for the school environment through observation, decision-making, and ecological reflection. This study aimed to describe changes in fifth-grade students’ environmental-care attitudes after four ecopedagogy-based Physical Education, Sports, and Health lessons and to portray movement participation and observable indicators of ecological behavior during implementation. A one-group pretest-posttest pre-experimental design involved 32 students. Attitudes were measured using 12 four-point items based on self-report, while class observations recorded at the aggregate level active movement participation, care for play areas/equipment, and ecological ideas. The mean attitude score increased from 29.50 (SD=6.71) to 32.19 (SD=8.51), with a mean change of +2.69 points. Twenty-four students (75.0%) increased, one (3.1%) was unchanged, and seven (21.9%) decreased. The proportion of students showing active movement participation ranged from 75.0% to 84.4%, care for areas/equipment from 53.1% to 68.8%, and ecological ideas from 31.3% to 53.1%. The findings indicate a positive but heterogeneous descriptive pattern, while differences in lesson tasks limit direct comparisons of observational indicators across sessions. Because no comparison group was included, the results are not interpreted as causal evidence or as evidence that physical activity duration and intensity were equivalent to those in conventional physical education, but as a basis for further development and stronger testing of ecopedagogy-based physical education.