Purposes of Physical Education in Secondary Education: a bibliographic review

Abstract

This paper aimed to carry out a literature review about the objectives and purposes of physical education (PE) in the school curricula of secondary educationIt was conducted a systematic review process using the PRISMA protocol from 2014 to May 2020 (included) in the databases Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC and SPORTDiscus, using the terms “physical education”, “purpose OR role” and “high school”. As a result, a total of 38 items were selected that met all the requirements for inclusion. The articles for the review were selected under the criteria: (a) written in Spanish, English, or Portuguese (b) published in a peer-reviewed journal (c) to include students between 12 and 16 years old, teachers or parents as participants. The results showed how most of the studies propose the category referred to the promotion of healthy lifestyles as the main objective of PE (20); there were also several studies related to the promotion of the like for physical activities (10) and promotion of health and sport-related learning (9). as well as the integral formation of the individual through PE, inside the general education aims category. The categories with less presence were the promotion of physical fitness (5), the general education aims (5) and category of promoting catharsis (3). The application of current knowledge in the initial and in-service training of teachers, in addition to educational curricula, would make it possible to align practice with ecological models that promote healthy and active lifestyles.