The Impact of Physical Education Teachers’ Digital Teaching Competencies, Empowered by Smart Education, on Student Participation in Physical Activity: A Time Series Analysis

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology and intelligent systems, smart education has emerged as a key direction in modern education, providing both technological support and practical pathways for cultivating core physical education and health competencies. In light of this, this study utilizes statistical data on physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities and students’ physical activity participation from 2010 to 2025 in a certain city. It establishes a vector autoregressive model between physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities and students’ physical activity participation, and employs unit root tests, cointegration analysis, impulse response functions, and variance decomposition to analyze and predict the interactive dynamics and time-series relationships between the two. The results indicate that a bidirectional Granger causality relationship exists between physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities and students’ physical activity participation. The contribution rate of students’ physical activity participation to changes in physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities is relatively high in the short term and then gradually decreases. The contribution rate of physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities to fluctuations in student physical activity participation showed a rapid upward trend after the second period, reaching 72.08104% by the eighth period. The variance contribution rate of physical education teachers’ digital teaching capabilities was significant and exhibited a continuous upward trend over time.