This is the video I submitted to the WMA (Wisconsin Montessori Association) 2022 conference. I was planning on presenting in person, but for safety, it was switched to virtual. I wanted to make sure that everyone who was interested in my research on the benefit of PE and classroom integration gets a chance to watch the presentation.
This video features an experiment that I conducted last spring. The upper elementary students were getting ready for the Science Fair, and I wanted to investigate the effects of integrating the scientific method into my PE lessons. What would it do to the students understanding of the scientific method?
For my masters thesis many years ago, I looked at the effect of integrating the classroom curriculum into lower elementary PE lessons on planets. I saw significant improvement in the memorization of the planet names and their order for the first and second year students, but not so much for the third years. This led me to investigate whether these integrated lessons would be effective in upper elementary.
I had one control group and four experiment groups. The control group received alternative PE lessons that did not feature content from the scientific method. The four experiment groups tested different PE and classroom combinations of how the scientific method was taught to them. One group only received the scientific method information in PE taught by me, one group had classroom lessons and PE lessons taught by me, and two other groups had classroom lessons plus my lessons taught by another adult.
Every single experiment group did significantly better than the control group. On average, students were able to memorize the steps of the scientific method two times better with PE integration. They also had six to eight times better comprehension of the scientific method than the control group. These results show that providing integrated Montessori physical education lessons significantly improved the students understanding of the scientific method. This significant improvement with the intervention may mean that other areas of the classroom curriculum can benefit by integrating these concepts in physical education.