Yoshihisa Ishikawa

From 2012 onward, judo has been a compulsory element in physical education lessons in junior high school in Japan. However, because judo is only introduced in junior high school, it is not part of the systematic curriculum that considers the stages of child development from elementary school on does not exist, unlike other sports, such as apparatus gymnastics and swimming, to which students are exposed in elementary school. Therefore, this study seeks to develop a set of teaching materials that incorporate judo games teaching basic judo moves into the physical education lessons of lower-elementary-school students (7-year-olds), and evaluate its usefulness in ensuring systematic progression between physical education lessons in elementary school and junior high school. The practical implementation of these lessons took place at an elementary school affiliated with a national university in Kagoshima Prefecture. The target students were 18 boys and 17 girls, for a total of 35 second-grade students. Six lessons were planned and implemented in February 2020. When evaluating the usefulness of the teaching materials developed, objective evaluation and subjective evaluation were considered together with tests of physical skills and motor ability. The results of this study show that in formative evaluation, used as a form of objective evaluation (Takahashi, 2003), there was an increase in assessment scores for the three elements—outcome, learning method, and cooperation—together with the total assessment scores. When students were asked to subjectively evaluate themselves in seven categories, including showing more awareness of their own bodies, adjusting the force used, and showing more awareness of other people’s bodies, six categories received higher scores in the second half of the teaching unit. In the test of physical skills and motor ability, at the end of the sixth lesson, both male and female students achieved higher scores in all three categories tested. Thus, the teaching materials developed in this study, which incorporate judo games that teach basic judo movements, have a strong possibility of being useful for physical education lessons targeted at 7-year-olds. The learning content developed in this study can be used beyond physical education lessons as it is generic and practical enough to be used as an instructional program in judo clubs targeted at children of similar age.