There are a number of measuring batteries for monitoring the development of the movement of school-age children around the world used to assess the development of movement abilities and movement skills. In Slovenia, schools during physical education classes annually measure the motor abilities of children with a Sports Educational Chart. However, there is no standardized measuring battery in the Slovenian school environment for measuring movement skills in children.
The University of Basel, with the desire for an instrument that monitors the effectiveness of physical education lessons by measuring movement skills in children, developed the MOBAK (German: Motorische Basiskompetenzen) project. MOBAK is a measurement battery that assesses two areas of motor competencies: object movement and self-movement. Within each area, there are four different measurement tasks, the difficulty of each adapted to the age of the students and increases over the years (Herrmann, Gerlach, et al., 2015).
In the 2021/2022 school year, under the auspices of the Faculty of Sports, University of Ljubljana, the test battery was trialled at thirty-eight Slovenian primary schools where physical education teachers, with the help of classroom teachers, tested a total of 961 first-grade students and 1004 second-grade students.
The purpose of this master's thesis was to analyze the received data on the movement skills of first- and second-grade children of primary school using the MOBAK-1-2 battery (Herrmann, Gerlach, et al., 2015). Furthermore, the goal was to assess the usefulness of this battery in the Slovenian school system in order to present physical education and class teachers with a battery for testing movement skills in children. This can act as a supplement to the Sports Educational Chart and also enable monitoring of the acquisition of basic movement skills.
In the theoretical part a descriptive method was used, and the empirical part the data in the statistical program IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 25) and the Microsoft Excel (2018) program was processed.
The content of MOBAK-1-2 tasks is consistent with the curriculum for the first triennium of primary school. Second-graders are more physically skilled than first-graders. Male students were more successful than female students in performing object movements, while female students were more successful in self-movement. The self-movement tasks were performed more successfully compared to the tasks of object movement. In the MOBAK-1- 2 area of object movement, the lowest-rated task was throwing, while in the area of self-movement, the best-rated task was balancing and the worst was jumping.
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