Relationship between Morphological Characteristics and Motor Knowledge in Eleven- year-old Female Pupils

The research was conducted with the aim to determine the relationship between morphological characteristics and motor knowledge of representative teaching materials of the official curriculum for Physical education for fifth grade female pupils in elementary school. In concordance with the stated, 16 anthropological measures for the evaluation of morphological characteristics and 7 tests of representative teaching material used for the evaluation of motor knowledge were applied on a sample of 152 female pupils. The results of canonical correlation analysis conducted on the systems of morphological variables and motor knowledge variables showed that one pair of statistically significant canonical factors with the 0.61 (p=0.00) canonical correlation coefficient was singled out. The relationship structure of the isolated significant pair of the canonical factor showed that pupils who achieved better results in the motor knowledge tests Fast running (60 m) from low start, Handstand against vertical surface, High jump (scissors technique), Front fall over the shoulder in the dominant side, had lower values in the measures of subcutaneous fat tissue and body volume, and vice versa. The remaining three motor knowledge tests showed somewhat lower, but still negative values of correlation with the mentioned anthropological measures. The redundancy indicators showed that it is possible to evaluate only 16.51% of the motor knowledge variables group variance using the morphological characteristics group of variables, and vice versa, and further on, that it is possible to evaluate 21.57% of the morphological characteristics group of variables variance using the motor knowledge group of Croatian Journal of Education Vol.18; No.1/2016, pages:137-156 Original research paper Paper submitted: 9 June 2015 Paper accepted: 1 September 2015 doi: 10.15516/cje.v18i1.1885 Vlahović, Babin and Babin: Relationship between Morphological Characteristics and Motor ... 138 variables. The obtained results showed that poorer performance of morphological knowledge in this research was undoubtedly due to endomorphic body stature of the female examinees, which was observed as a pronouncedly disturbing factor.