EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT OF PLAY-BASED PHYSICAL LEARNING AND CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT IN SANMENXIA PRIMARY SCHOOL

Abstract

Driven by national policies on compulsory education quality improvement and the national youth fitness promotion strategy, primary physical education in inland Chinese cities is undergoing a shift from skill-drill oriented teaching to play-centered developmental pedagogy. Nevertheless, primary schools in Sanmenxia, an inland prefecture-level city in Henan Province, face prominent mismatches between institutional management systems and children’s holistic developmental demands, restricting the educational value of play-based physical learning. Guided by Organizational Behavior Theory, Caillois’s Play Typology, Dewey’s Experiential Play Theory and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this mixed-method research targets PE teachers and sports administrators from public primary schools in Sanmenxia to explore the current operation level of play-based physical learning management, identify core restrictive administrative factors, and construct localized optimization governance frameworks. A total of 285 practitioners formed the research population; 165 valid questionnaires were collected for quantitative analysis via SPSS 26.0, and semi-structured interview transcripts of 5 core campus sports managers were coded through Nvivo 12. Descriptive statistics reveal the composite overall management score reaches 3.46 (moderate level). Among five core dimensions, Children’s Holistic Development Outcomes (M=3.73) and Student Developmental Factors (M=3.69) rank at high levels, while Primary Physical Education Quality Management scores the lowest (M=3.16). The most prominent bottlenecks include incomplete tiered teacher training & dual-track incentive mechanisms, unbalanced distribution of game venues/digital teaching aids, and single skill-oriented evaluation systems lacking multi-dimensional growth tracking. Correlation and thematic interview results confirm that standardized teacher support, sufficient game resource allocation and whole-process holistic assessment positively boost students’ intrinsic sports motivation and balanced physical-cognitive-social development, whereas fragmented management, insufficient inclusive game design and absent resource sharing generate widespread sports weariness and low sports self-efficacy. This study constructs a five-dimensional optimization system covering teacher cultivation, inclusive student support, regional resource sharing, multi-dimensional quality supervision and school-family-bureau collaborative governance. The findings enrich localized empirical evidence of play-based PE administration in inland Chinese primary schools, fill regional research gaps of central inland prefecture-level cities, and provide operable decision references for advancing balanced compulsory physical education and realizing holistic child development under Healthy China 2030.