Social emotional learning skills and courage of 10-12 year-old students according to their individual variables, physical education, game and sport participation

In this research, social emotional learning skills and courage of 10-12 year-old students according to their individual variables, physical education, game and sport participation were examined. The purpose of this research is to put forward the role of the features such as the students' gender and age, the number of siblings they have, whether they have pre-school education, having their own rooms or not, their choice of hand and foot use, identifying themselves as an introvert or extrovert, participating in a school team, taking part in sports club, how often they perform physical activities, exercises and games in a week apart from the physical education lesson, what they place importance the most in terms of physical education and games and their choice of game types on social emotional learning and courage. In addition, the correlation between social emotional learning and courage was also analyzed. Among the quantitative research methods, descriptive method was used and relational screening model was used as survey model in this study. The research population consisted of 10-12 year-old students in all primary and secondary schools of central district of Osmaniye Province in 2015-2016 school year. The sample was composed of 862 students in total; 464 (%53,8) of whom were females and 398 (%46,2) of whom were males from 3 primary and secondary schools which were selected as the sample group among all the primary and secondary schools in the central district through the multi-stage cluster sampling method. The data collection tools used in this research are as follows; Personal Information Form developed by the researcher was used to determine the personal characteristics of the students and their participation features in physical education and games; Social Emotional Learning Scale (SELS) was used to indicate the students' level of social emotional learning and Revised Version of Sport Courage Scale for Children (RSCS) was used to identify the courage of the students. The analysis of the research data was carried out with SPSS 15.0 software package. The techniques; Average, Median, Mode, Skewness, Kurtosis, Percentage, Frequency, Standard Deviation, Spearman-Brown Rank Correlation Coefficient, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, t tests for independent samples, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Scheffe test, Games-Howell test and ordinal logistic regression were used for data analysis. The results of statistical analysis of the data acquired are as follows: It was determined that there was a positive and significant correlation between social emotional learning and courage in medium-level. Moreover, there were positive and significant relations between all the sub-dimensions of social emotional learning (responsible decision making, peer relationship, self-regulation) and courage (mastery/self-confidence, determination, assertiveness, venturesome, self-sacrifice/sacrifice behaviour). It could be inferred that the student's being an 11 year-old female, having a pre-school education, having her own room, identifying herself as an extrovert, participating in individual sports in the school team, engaging in activities such as physical activities, exercises and games every day apart from physical education lesson, playing cooperative games effected social emotional learning. It could be concluded that the student's being 12 years old, identifying herself/himself as an extrovert, participating in the team sports of any sports club, engaging in activities such as physical activities, exercises and games every day apart from physical education lesson, placing importance on winning or making progress during physical education lesson effected courage. Significant differences were found on social emotional learning of 10-12 year-old students in terms of gender, age, the number of siblings they have, whether having a pre-school education and having their own rooms, their choice of hand and foot use, identifying themselves as an introvert or extrovert, participating in a school team, taking part in sports club, how often they perform physical activities, exercises and games in a week apart from the physical education lesson, what they place importance the most in terms of physical education and games and their choice on types of games. No significant differences were found in 10-12 year-old students' social emotional learning with regard to the features of whether they participated in the school team or took part in a sports club. There were significant differences found on courage of 10-12 year-old students in terms of gender, age, whether having a pre-school education and having their own rooms, identifying themselves as an introvert or extrovert, whether participating in a school team and taking part in sports club, how often they perform physical activities, exercises and games in a week apart from the physical education lesson, what they place importance the most in terms of physical education and games and their choice on types of games. No significant differences were found in 10-12 year-old students' courage with regard to the number of siblings they have, their choice of hand and foot use. Keywords: Physical Education, Game, Sports, Social Emotional Learning, Courage.