Perceived Importance of Slovenian Physical Education Teachers' Professional Competencies

This cross-sectional study was designed to evaluate perceived importance of Slovenian physical education teachers' (PETs) professional competencies with the aim of diagnosing the main needs of practising PE teachers and preparing continued professional development programmes. For this purpose, a self-administered questionnaire has been designed to examine a wide scope of general and subject-specific competencies among 672 Slovenian PETs. The participants evaluated their own actual professional competencies on a four-level scale. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of internal consistency was used to estimate the reliability of a questionnaire, and factor analysis was used in order to examine an internal structure of competency field. The results point to the high degree of reliability of the entire questionnaire (Cronbach alpha=.97), whereas the values of individual segments of variables vary between .62 and .92. The competency profile of teachers is quite complex, as it consists of 11 factors, which together explain 57.6% of the total variance. Didactic approaches as the subject-specific competencies, which represent the first factor, seemed to be the most informative for PETs, explaining 33.8% of the total variance.