Cooperative learning and SDG 5. An intervention for physical education in secondary schools

Abstract

Background: Nowadays, there is great concern about gender inequality in many areas of the recent scenario; an aspect that is being pursued through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), exactly through SDG 5; cooperative learning seems to be one of the ways to achieve gender equality in secondary school students. It is essential to investigate new methodologies to try to curb many of the problems that have been active for many years, and it is crucial to promote and encourage these values in society at the educational stages. However, there is still not enough research that has been carried out on this subject, so there is still much to learn. Therefore, the aim of this research is to analyse whether the effect of a didactic unit of Physical Education through cooperative learning shows improvements in the attitudes of coeducation in secondary school students. Method: A total of 131 secondary school students (74 females), with a mean age of 14.46 ± 0.64 years, carried out the study. A quasi-experimental, pre-post study was carried out using a control and experimental group. The sample was not randomised. For 5 weeks, the control group maintained normal Physical Education sessions, following a more traditional methodology based on direct command. Results: The experimental group, on the other hand, carried out the 5 sessions of the didactic unit based on the cooperative learning methodology, through mixed groupings. To assess the normality of the sample, the Kolmogorov Smirnov test was used to confirm that the sample was non-parametric. To measure the effect of the intervention, Mann Whitney and Wilcoxon tests were performed. The statistics showed that the experimental group was significantly higher than the control in two of its factors in the pre, but no significant differences were shown in the post. Conclusions: These findings do not verify the main objective of the study, perhaps as a consequence of the quantitative difference of the samples between groups and between stages (pre-post), or as a consequence of insufficient or erroneous programming. Finally, it would be interesting to evaluate the same results by segmenting by gender to see if more significant differences are shown.