Investigating students' cognitive perceptions on physical education and sports course achievements using word associ̇ati̇on test (WAT)

The aim of this study is to determine students' cognitive perceptions and misconceptions towards concepts selected from physical education and sports course outcomes. The study was conducted using a descriptive survey model and the Vocabulary Association Test (VAT) was used as a data collection tool. The sample of the study consisted of 218 (126 male - 92 female) 11th grade students from five high schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in Bitlis province. The key concepts of free movement, rhythmic movement, game, healthy nutrition, healthy life, free time, sports branch, sports organization, ceremony and celebration, fair-play, traditional Turkish sports were presented to the students. In the analysis of the data, the association coefficient index method was used to determine the relationship between the key concepts. In addition, frequency tables of the answers given to the key concepts were created and concept networks were created by determining the cut-off points. Students were asked to write one sentence for the purpose. The sentences obtained were grouped according to their structures. It was determined that the strongest relationship between the key concepts was between "Healthy Nutrition" and "Healthy Life" and the weakest relationship was between "Free Time" and "Sports Branch". The most frequently used answer words for the key concepts are as follows: walking for the key concept of free movement, dance for rhythmic movement, fun for game, protein for healthy nutrition, sport for healthy life, game for free time, football for sport branch, Olympics for sport organization, April twenty-third for ceremony and celebration, gentleman for fair-play, and javelin for traditional Turkish sport. Finally, when the sentence examples written by the students were analyzed, it was determined that they had misconceptions about the concepts of game and free time. Keywords: Physical Education and Sports, Word Association Test, Cognitive Perception, Concept Map, Outcome.