1 TÜRKİYE PROFESYONEL LİGLERİNDE GÖREV ... - Spor Bilim

This study examines commonly expressed concerns about gender equity in coed
physical education for boys and girls by focusing on the teachers’ and students’ gender
stereotyped beliefs and its association or disassociation with teacher-student interactions.
Some researchers believed that the quality of classroom interactions affects the growth and
learning of all students, and that teachers have a responsibility to model gender-fair attitudes
in their classrooms (1,2).
In physical education context, there is evidence that student-to-student and teacher-to-
student interactions show some levels of gender bias favoring boys (3, 4). Appropriate gender
beliefs of teachers play a major role in determining their approaches to boys and girls in the
classroom. In many studies, many teachers saw classroom discipline as a matter of power and
control (5), which was frequently associated with masculine attribute, and the ideology of
hegemonic masculinity (6, 7).
In this study, gender interaction in the physical education classroom is intended to be
investigated in relation to the issue of power and control, therefore systematic classroom
observations were conducted based on gender interaction. Many studies from general
educational literature indicates that teachers tend to interact differently with boys than with
girls (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) and boys were involved in more interactions with teachers
than girls (12, 15). Empirical research on classroom interaction states that boys receive more
attention in class from teachers than do girls and boys are those more likely to influence the
course of events in the classroom (8, 9, 16, 13).
A renewed interest in gender interaction in physical education classroom focusing on
gender stereotyped beliefs of teachers and students could help to clarify the significance of
more equitable physical education environment for girls and boys. Therefore, the first purpose
of this study was to examine the frequency and type of which teachers and students initiate
interaction in order to determine whether gender differences still exist. The second purpose
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