Textbooks and Learning Materials in Physical Education in the International Context: Literature Review

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the research carried out internationally in recent years regarding textbooks, teaching materials, and the field of physical education. The objectives to which this article aims are as follows: To offer a compilation of current research papers published in the Scopus, Web of Science, and Dialnet databases and to provide a classification of the research lines undertaken on the subject. The information used is based on a review of studies listed in Scopus, Web of Science, and Dialnet. For this, a systematic review was carried out with the terms: “curricular resources”, “didactic materials”, “digital resources”, “educational resource”, “physical education”, and “textbooks”, allowing the selection of original articles, which included information on this line of research. For the literature review, only articles that presented scientific evidence were used, discarding merely descriptive articles or didactic experiences that were not investigated with the scientific protocol. A total of 589 articles were found, although after applying the review’s inclusion criteria, they were reduced to 54 articles. The investigations do not follow a common protocol and the researchers address multiple objectives in them, highlighting the studies on the implicit ideological discourse in the images of physical education textbooks. The results reveal a diversity of research, in particular, studies involving ideological discourse. Insofar as methodology, content analysis of textbooks and materials was the most common approach.