Joseph Lobo
The findings suggest that engagement in ballroom-based PE is linked less to affective enjoyment alone and more to students' recognition of ballroom dance as useful, personally meaningful, and connected to further learning. Positioning ballroom pedagogy around usefulness, self-relevance, cultural meaning, and knowledge-seeking may help PE instructors present dance-based learning as a more purposeful movement experience in Philippine HE.
BACKGROUND: Ballroom dance remains a contested domain in Philippine higher education, often perceived as formal, outdated, or misaligned with the values and movement preferences of contemporary learners. Within physical education, this creates a need to examine how students' individual interest relates to their study engagement in ballroom-based learning contexts.
OBJECTIVE: This cross-sectional study examined the association between individual interest and study engagement in ballroom-based physical education, using the tripartite model of individual interest comprising positive affect and willingness to reengage, stored utility value, and stored attainment value and knowledge-seeking intentions.
METHODS: A total of 138 Filipino college students enrolled in PATH-FIT 4 participated in the study. Data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Individual interest was first modeled as a reflective-reflective higher-order construct, followed by a dimension-level model examining the separate associations of the three individual interest dimensions with study engagement. An importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) was also conducted to identify the practical relevance of each dimension in relation to study engagement.
RESULTS: The higher-order model showed that individual interest was positively associated with study engagement and accounted for 49.3% of its variance. In the dimension-level model, stored utility value showed the strongest positive association with study engagement, followed by stored attainment value and knowledge-seeking intentions. Positive affect and willingness to reengage was not significantly associated with study engagement after accounting for the other dimensions.
CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that engagement in ballroom-based PE is linked less to affective enjoyment alone and more to students' recognition of ballroom dance as useful, personally meaningful, and connected to further learning. Positioning ballroom pedagogy around usefulness, self-relevance, cultural meaning, and knowledge-seeking may help PE instructors present dance-based learning as a more purposeful movement experience in Philippine HE.