INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAINING METHODOLOGY IMPACT ON MOTOR QUALITIES OF SCHOOL BOYS

ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary approach encourages students to put into practice the new knowledge and skills they have acquired in the course of their education in different school subjects. It helps them develop abilities to find content and functional connections between processes and phenomena studied in different school disciplines. The present study aimed to establish the effect of the interdisciplinary methodology applied in the subject of Physical Education and Sport on the development of motor skills of boys in the second grade at primary school. The object of the study was the level of improvement of the motor skills of school boys in the second grade. The experimental group included 8 boys from the Primary School “Otez Paisii” in the town of Knezha, Bulgaria, where the new interdisciplinary methodology was implemented. The control group using the traditional education methods included 14 boys from the 120 Primary School “G.S. Rakovski” in Sofia, Bulgaria. The experimental methodology was applied for a period of two school years. The students were tested twice in this period; the first was in September 2020, and the second was in May 2022. The interdisciplinary methodology was specially developed to involve several school subjects – Physical Education and Sport, Bulgarian Language and Literature, Mathematics, English Language, Man and Society, and Man and Nature. The compulsory course program in Physical Education and Sport contains adapted educational content from the other school subjects, grounded on meaningful connections with them. The following tests were used to evaluate the students’ motor skills: 30-meter run, standing long jump (with a two-footed take-off), throwing a solid ball - 1 kg, 200-meter shuttle run, Т-test, sit-ups, depth of bending, and frequency of knocking. After processing the acquired test results, it was established that the methodology used for interdisciplinary education in Physical Education and Sport was very efficient in developing the motor skills of ten-year-old boys.