Understanding the development of physical education professionals’ policy capacity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and others have emphasized the need for all physical education (PE) professionals to prioritize attention to, and action on, PE policy to improve quality provision. Yet, policy neglect remains arguably normative in PE due, in part, to a lack of preparation for policy in higher education and professional learning programmes. Furthermore, research on what such preparation should entail has not been conducted. Therefore, in this research we asked: What are the key facilitators, barriers, and content in the development of PE professionals’ policy capacity (i.e. policy interest, understanding, and involvement/action/initiative)? A two-round interview and survey Delphi investigation with 16 international PE professionals with experience in policy research and/or practical initiatives was conducted. Participants were asked about key barriers, facilitators, and content in the development of their own and others’ policy capacity. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that while participants acknowledged the barriers of lacking time, professional learning, confidence, and accessible language, the barrier they identified as most consequential was misunderstanding the nature of policy as only fixed documents developed in a top-down and linear process. In contrast, participants identified their shifts to understanding policy as more than static texts and as happening in complex processes to be a key facilitator, with reflexive interactions and relationships with others being critical to facilitating that perspective shift. Other facilitators identified included the issuing of moral imperatives to ‘use’ policy to generate change, policy learning in higher education, and the interrogation of policy. When considered alongside the existing literature, these findings highlight that: (a) dispelling unrealistic traditional policy myths and fostering complex policy perspectives is central to policy capacity development; (b) particular configurations of policy-focused learning communities are a key way to do that; and (c) one must determine their personal policy purpose to engage in such work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".