The attention of students during physical education class based on academic performance

Attention is an important variable that can dictate the success and failure of an activity or task. This variable is characterized by the ability to direct cognitive resources to a given situation. The purpose of this research was to find patterns in the students' attention profiles, according to their academic achievement, during the physical education class and in different sports. We used the ATEST-EF questionnaire (Petrica, 2010) in which students had to answer the question "What were you thinking the moment you heard the signal?" The study involved 156 students from the 3th cycle of basic education, aged between 12 and 16 years old ((X) over bar 14,7 +/- 1,3) evaluated in four different sports taught in the discipline of physical education (athletics, gymnastics, basketball and football), and in four moments of the class. Considering our variables, we used Chi-Square and Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests. The results show that task attendance holds the highest percentage values throughout the class in relation to the remaining categories, regardless of their academic performance and sport, but we observed that students with satisfactory and good academic performance have more stable values of attention regarding the students with less academic performance. We found statistical significance at the end of the class between students with good academic performance and affective attention, and among students with lower academic performance and attention to other things. Subsequently, we used the same classification to compare the profiles of attention among the four mentioned sports. We observed some patterns between team and individual sports, but did not find statistically differences, however the results suggest a positive relationship between attention and academic performance.