New Dancemat Research Project at MGS

One of the things that I am keen to do at Musselburgh is get the school recognised as a centre for micro and action research. I think it is really important that schools remain abreast of the latest education research and use it to best inform their practice. I also think the best education research is research that is conducted in partnership between schools and higher education institutes. Last year we teamed up with Glasgow University to look at the Pupil Voice within the school and Herriot Watt University to look at Girls Participation in PE. Edinburgh University are also going to be helping us with a few other projects later this year.

One very exciting project that I have been working on in the background for nearly two years is to try and fund a research project linked to dance mats and exercise. We recently teamed up with Herriot Watt University to take this project forward and over the summer we found out that our funding had come through for the project from the Chief Scientists Office. We had a meeting about the project today and we hope to appoint a project development office to take this project forward in early September.

During the project we will:

• Sample activity and active living data from approximately 150 S3 girls. We will do this via questionnaire.

• Collect data on the benefits of exergaming using dance mats from a sample size of 20 volunteers from within S3.

• Conduct a study into active participation using dancemats.

• The project will take place in two phases. Between October – December and January – March!

Our next challenge is to identity additional funding to increase the amount of mats in order to make this project sustainable for class use after the initial research phase.

This and all future post related to this project will be catagorised and tagged with ‘dancemats’.