INTENSIVE BASIC SWIMMING COURSES AND THEIR EFFECT ON CHILDREN´S SWIMMING LITERACY

The main aim of the research is to determine the effect of a 5-day-long intensive swimming course on swimming literacy for pupils from elementary school. We used a set of four tests of basic swimming skills for establishing the input and output levels of their swimming skills, which were point-rated and ranked according to their difficulty. Pupils attended the swimming course 5 days in a row, each day for 45 minutes and each hour had its own goals and content. We tested 60 pupils from elementary school with an average age of 9 years. Monitored changes in pupils' swimming literacy according to the evaluation scales are compared statistically by Chi-quadrate. For the evaluation of practical significance we used the effect size Cramer´s φc (10 small effect size, .30 medium effect size, .50 large effect size). By comparison of changes in the input and output results we found that our tested probands achieved in the output testing reveal statistically significant better results in comparison with input testing in each test of basic swimming skills. We consider that the response to a short intensive swimming course, where pupils were in everyday contact with the water and their instructor, is significant according to the results and it can be regarded as a useful tool for the development of children´s basic swimming literacy.