Attempt to create a simple version of evaluation criteria for the straddle vaulting movements in elementary school children

Evaluating the movements of exercisers and setting movement patterns according to the skill levels are effective in improving skills and examining the effectiveness of instruction in exercise guidance. The purpose of this study was to create a simple version of evaluation criteria for the straddle vaulting that can be used in teaching situations, based on the observational evaluation criteria and the classification of proficiency patterns in Sano et al. (2019). The subjects were 513 elementary school children (248 boys and 265 girls). We created several 6-item sets to evaluate take-off, push-off, and landing movements that separate proficiency. The latent class analysis for each item set using the data of 410 children randomly selected from the 513 resulted in adoption of a simple version consisting of 6 items: “Adjusting free leg flexion”, “Rebound jump”, “Push-off,” “Rotating backward”, “Alignment of both legs”, and “Stopping firmly”. We calculated the coefficient of specialization for each evaluation category among the 6 items, and we identified the key categories for classifying proficiency with the simple evaluation criteria without using statistical analysis. Our examination revealed classification match rates of 89.8% between the analysis result of 23-items and the simple version, and 93.7% between the result of 6-item and the simple version, both of which were sufficiently high. Cross-validation using the data of the remaining 103 children resulted in extraction of the same movement patterns observed for the 410 children, and the match rate was 94.2% between the analysis result of 6-items and the simple version. Based on these results, we created a simple version of the evaluation criteria for the straddle vaulting that can accurately classify proficiency with a small number of items without using latent class analysis. In the future, the usability of the simple version in face-to-face evaluation and the further validity will require verification.