THE APPLICATION OF INNOVATION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION INSTRUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD

Özet

This systematic review and interpretive synthesis aimed to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based framework for the effective incorporation of emerging technologies and AI into physical education. The search was conducted in international and Persian databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, SID and Noormags in order to identify studies published between 2015 up to 2024. The search process resulted in the identification of 1,283 records; after removal of the duplicated papers, title/abstract evaluation, and full-text evaluation of potential studies, 47 studies were selected for the current review (20 international studies and 27 Iranian studies). The quality of the studies included in the current review was evaluated using the Cochrane RoB 2, CASP and MMAT checklists. The technologies were categorized into three pedagogical levels: monitoring by means of wearable technologies, feedback provided through VR and video analysis, and somatization via AI-driven systems. While emerging technologies in physical education hold great promise for PE in terms of providing opportunities for personalization of instruction and increasing PE engagement, several barriers to adoption, including a number of ethical concerns (e.g. data privacy, algorithmic bias), the digital divide, and lack of preparation on the part of teachers to utilize technologies for teaching and learning physical education, need to be addressed. The current review drew attention to the strategic role of teachers in physical education and to the ways in which they can integrate emerging technologies into PE in order to realize physical education’s educational goals. The current review also highlighted several important research gaps including the scarcity of long-term studies conducted in regular school settings and the lack of locally grounded teaching models. The technologies reviewed in this article are enablers and not substitutes for teachers in physical education; thus, these technologies must be creatively combined with the teacher’s strategic role and within the framework of PE’s educational goals with support from professional development, local knowledge production, and equitable policymaking.