Introduction

The last 20 years has witnessed a rapid expansion in research and knowledge concerning the many factors that influence learning and teaching in physical education. These include such issues as the context in which physical education teachers work, what teachers think about when they are teaching and planning their teaching, and the knowledge they require to teach effectively. However, it is only in recent years that research has begun to provide an insight into what physical education teachers feel about their role and their lives in teaching, and what pupils themselves feel about the physical education they experience in schools. In fact, research that actually focuses on the pupils, their feelings, their thought processes, what motivates them, and how they respond to the instruction provided by the teacher has only recently attracted limited research interest. That is why we have emphasized pupil learning in both the title of this book, and in the placement of the chapters. It is not that we see research on teaching as having less importance, but that we feel that the time is ripe to focus as strongly on research into pupil learning and motivation in physical education as on research into teaching, teachers and the context of teaching. As Merlin Wittrock (1986) has pointed out, the study of pupils’ thought processes brings a distinctive perspective to the understanding of teachers’ effects on learning, and:

…emphasises the critical role that student background knowledge, perceptions of instruction, attention to the teacher, motivation and attribution for learning, affective processes, and ability to generate interpretations and understandings of instruction play in teaching and in influencing student achievement’, (p. 297)