Examination of secondary students' sufficiency to physical education course, and physical activity levels and exam anxiety: Dicle district example

It is a known fact that students are given exams at every educational level within the education system. Exams, especially when moving from secondary school level to secondary school level, are generally seen as a major source of stress for students. Therefore, it is expected that these stressful situations increase anxiety. The education system is carried out according to a certain systematic order and these courses are determined in a certain order of importance according to the benefits they will provide in the exams. Courses in the education system are ranked in order of importance according to their contribution to the exam. While this ranking is a ranking made by the individual, it is actually an indicator based on the scoring within the exam system. For this reason, physical education course is seen by some individuals as unimportant, as it does not contribute to the exam, or as a course that only has an impact on the grading system, on the grounds that it does not contribute to the exam. However, educational life requires the existence of physical education classes for the purpose of physical activity and spiritual and physical contributions as well as the lessons accompanying the exam questions. For this purpose, students who experience intense stress are likely to relax and socialize with physical and sports activities, and benefit from psychological support, especially through activities such as team sports. The aim of the research is to conduct a study in the context of Dicle district in order to examine the dispositions of secondary school students to physical education lessons, their physical activity levels and exam anxiety, and the results obtained will contribute to the field. The research was conducted on 589 secondary school students studying in Dicle district. Survey measurement technique, one of the quantitative research methods, was used in the research. "Physical Education Susceptibility Scale", developed by Hilland et al. (2009) and adapted to Turkish by Öncü et al. (2015), was used by Schembre et al. (2015) to determine students' attitudes and self-efficacy towards the physical education course. The Cognitive Behavioral Physical Activity Scale, developed by Eskiler et al. (2016) and adapted to Turkish, and the Exam Anxiety Scale, developed by Driscoll (2007) and adapted to Turkish by Totan and Yavuz (2009), were used. In the study, which aims to organize physical education lessons as activities that help reduce the anxiety of students, especially those experiencing test anxiety, through physical activities, as a result of the correlation analysis between the test anxiety scale of secondary school students and the cognitive behavioral physical activity scale, a weak relationship was found between result expectation and test anxiety, one of the sub-dimensions of the cognitive behavioral physical activity scale. conclusion has been reached. In this regard, the results were obtained and analyzed in the example of Dicle district. According to these results, it is seen that students' anxiety levels decrease to some extent with physical activities.