Actividad física, metacognición y rendimiento académico en alumnado de 6º curso de primaria

Abstract

The present study proposes an investigation with a descriptive and correlational transversal design (ex post-facto). The sample under study consists of 134 students (56% women), all of them 6th grade students of Primary Education with ages between 11 and 13 years (M = 11.50 years old, DT = .54), and belonging to 3 Primary Schools in the north of Spain, two of them public and one concerted. The main objective was to study the relationships between the variables physical activity, academic performance and metacognition of the students, as well as to perform an exploratory factorial and confirmatory factorial analysis of the short version in Spanish of the "Self-Regulation of Self-Report Scale" (SRL-SRS-C), for which a double translation (translation-back translation) process was previously carried out, following the guidelines of Hambleton y Zenisky (2011). To collect data about physical activity, the "Physical Activity Questionnaire for Children" (PAQ-C) and ActiGraph-WG3X accelerometry devices have been used, while for the academic performance, the academic grades of all the subjects have been taken into account trunks and the specific ones of Artistic Education and Physical Education. The adjustment indices of the confirmatory factor analysis showed that the model fits the data well: S-Bχ2 (215) = 221.91, p = .358; * CFI = .99; * RMSEA (90% CI) = .016 (0.00-0.04); SRMR = .066. A positive, although weak, relationship was found between the physical activity classified as sedentary and the academic performance, but only for the female sex. Vigorous and very vigorous physical activity (analyzed together) showed a negative relationship, although also weak, with the academic performance of the subject of Foreign Language (English), only in the female sex.