Exploration of the relationship between physical literacy and literacy through a health and wellbeing perspective

Implementing an environmental approach, as set upon the lifelong continuum (Gabbard, 2021), is one means to embrace literacy as a holistic pedagogical concept to towards lifelong health and wellbeing. Complementing this with a pedagogy interweaving critical thinking into the learning series seeks to progress student self (and collective) agency along this journey (Murray and Napper-Owen, 2021) seeks to justly facilitate beyond school opportunities amidst the variation of accessibility for children in differing settings and circumstance.
This quasi-experimental study employs mixed methods. It seeks to learn more about the role metacognition plays upon physical literacy toward health and wellbeing as implemented in an interdisciplinary manner. It proffers to provide a tangible way to integrate agency developing strategies for children across learning. Participants completed a semester in physical education, set across a varied set of environments (Murray and Howells, 2024). They completed formative and summative national level evaluations, together with pre-post evaluations around critical thinking and health related fitness biomotor indices. The secondary school students (N=90) were randomly assigned into two groups; in efforts to illuminate any correlations between critical thinking competence and capacity to progress learning and proficiency across physical literacy concepts.
We sought to learn more about whether children with greater critical thinking aptitude displayed greater propensity and competency across their semester of learning, and indeed how they might utilise (any of) this when both in class, and furthermore, any likelihood of intention when away from school over the summer. Its design is based upon the Brown Framework of Metacognition (1987).