Caracterização do desempenho motor e acadêmico de estudantes da rede pública de ensino da cidade de Maceió-AL: avaliação pré e pós Covid-19

Abstract

Studies have shown that among the outcomes of health interference caused by social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, negative influences on the motor and academic performance of basic education students can be pointed out as examples. The objective of this study was to characterize the motor and academic performance of basic education students participating in the Pedagogical Residency Program (PRP) in the editions 2018-2020 and 2022-2024, pre and post-pandemic periods. The type of study conducted was descriptive correlational, the participants were 30 students, mostly girls (56.7%) enrolled in the same public municipal school in the city of Maceió, in the period from 2018 to 2024, participants of the PRP. The data collection instruments were: a) to measure body coordination in children, the Körperkoordinationstest Für Kinder (KTK) instrument was used, and b) for the results of cognitive performance, the average grades in Portuguese and mathematics of each child were analyzed from the school report card. The data were tabulated and recorded in Microsoft Excel. For the analysis of the results, the JASP statistical program (version 1.131.0) was used. In the descriptive analysis, the categorical and continuous variables were evaluated in terms of absolute and relative frequency distribution, mean, and standard deviation when necessary. Considering that the study data was collected at two different times, in terms of age range, the participants had a mean of 8.1 ± 1.3 years in 2019 and 12.3 ± 1.2 years in 2023. In the first and second moments of the research, respectively, in the context of educational training, the students were mostly in the 2nd year of elementary school (66%) and in the 6th year of elementary school (66%). Regarding the level of motor performance, at both times, the sample was predominantly classified as having insufficient coordination, with 66.8% and 76.8% of the participants in the first and second moments, respectively. The study also conducted a more detailed analysis of each of the four tasks applied to the students. In the comparison of the sample mean at the two different times (paired t-test), all four variables of coordinative performance (KTK test) showed a decrease in the means with significant differences between the results. The tests related to the evaluations of balance on the beam, lateral jump, and lateral transposition presented large effect sizes, with the single-leg jump variable being the only one that presented a medium to large effect size (d = 0.439). The results showed that the students presented a decrease in the average of the three tasks, which implies a worsening of the results in terms of coordinative skills when comparing the pre and post-pandemic period. Considering the outcomes caused in the pre and post-COVID-19 pandemic context, the retest conducted with the same elementary and middle school students, in the same environment, showed the same classification of insufficient coordination for motor skills. Tests such as KTK can be understood beyond their global results. The analysis of the results of the motor skills tasks (balance, rhythm, strength, speed, laterality, and spatiotemporal structure) seems to demonstrate that the time interval, crossed by the pandemic, caused significantly worse interference for the participants' results. Regarding academic performance, there was also a decrease in the means between the collection times, presenting statistical significance. For the effect size, both in mathematics (d = 0.604) and Portuguese (d = 0.754) were considered medium to large. Thus, the study concludes that there is a correlation between the negative interferences of the results of motor and cognitive skills among elementary school students before and after the pandemic.