Examining of university students' assertiveness levels and attitudes towards physical education course

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to research the assertiveness levels of university students and their attitudes toward physical education course in terms of gender, doing regular sports and academic achievement. The design of the research is descriptive. The sample of the study consists of university students who take physical education and sport course in the first aid and emergency department of Artvin Coruh University in the 2018-2019 academic year. A total of 116 university students with a mean age of 20.64 participated in the study as voluntarily. Physical Education and Sport Attitude Scale was used to measure students’ attitudes and the Rathus Assertiveness Inventory was used to measure assertiveness levels. In the study, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to determine the distribution of normality, the Pearson correlation test was used to examine the relationship between students' attitudes towards physical education and sport and assertiveness levels, the independent sample t-test in parametric distributions, the Mann Whitney U test was used in non-parametric distributions. Kruskal Wallis test was used in more than two groups because the distributions are not normal. According to the findings, there was a negative correlation between the assertiveness levels of students and their attitudes toward physical education course. There was a significant difference between the attitudes towards physical education course in terms of gender, on the contrary, there was no significant difference between assertiveness levels in terms of gender. There was no significant difference between assertiveness levels and the attitudes towards physical education course in terms of doing regular sports and there was no significant difference between assertiveness levels and the attitudes towards physical education course in terms of academic achievement. As a result, although there was a negative relationship between attitudes of university students towards physical education and sports course and assertiveness levels, it was observed that attitudes towards the course are more positive in favor of male students. There were no significant differences between the levels of assertiveness and attitudes towards physical education and sports courses in terms of doing regular sports and academic achievement levels.