Study on the Mechanism of Online PE Learning Performance: Mediating Effect of Interactions

Introduction: With the rapid development of Internet technology and its wide application in education, online education has become an important way for people to learn knowledge in the digital era. Due to the time-space separation teachers and students, as well as their lack of face-to-face communication during online learning, it is difficult to accurately estimate the learning performance of online physical education (PE). Therefore, the relationship among teachers’ instructional activity (IA) , students’ sports activity and ability (SAA), and online PE learning performance (LP), as well as the mediating effect of interactions (IB), are mainly studied in this paper. Methods: Through the questionnaire of online PE learning activity, this paper investigated the online PE learning situation of 691 college students in Shaanxi Province. SPSS26.0 was used for description and correlation analysis of the variables, and then AMOS26.0 version was used to draw a structural equation modeling. The bias-corrected non-parametric percentage Bootstrap method (5000 repeated samples) was selected to estimate the 95% confidence interval (CI) and test the mediating effect of interactions. Results: (1) There is a significant positive correlation (p<0.001) among four variables. (2) A structural equation model with interactions as the mediating variable was established. All fitting test values of the corrected model reached the fitting standards(c ² /df=4.494, P＜0.001, RMSEA=0.071, GFI=0.910，NFI=0.938, CFI=0.951, IFI=0.951), so that the mediating effect has been persuasive. (3) According to the corrected model path coefficients, IA can explain 30.6% and 25.6% of the variation of IB and LP, SAA can explain 32.3% and 45.8% of the variation of IB and LP, while IB can directly explain 9% of the variation of LP. (4) The effects of IA, SAA, IB, and LP did not contain 0 in the upper and lower limits of the bootstrap95% CI, indicating that the mediating effect of interactions has been persuasive. Conclusion: (1) Both teachers’ instructional activity and students’ sports activity and ability can exert a positive impact on learning performance. (2) Teachers’ instructional activity is the decisive factor for students participate in learning. Teachers can improve the quality of interactions through teaching behavior, thereby improving students’ learning performance. (3) Students’ sports activity and ability are the driving force for their participate in learning. The stronger students’ sports activity and ability are, the more active they will be in classroom interaction and the better learning performance they will get. (4) Interactions can play a crucial role in learning performance, because the occurrence of interactions can effectively enhance the initiative of students and the classroom interest.