Skill ability is essential to effective teaching in physical education. This study examined how the pre-service teachers' game performance competency influenced their own teaching practices in a basketball unit.
Method
The participants were thirteen physical education teacher education (PETE) students who enrolled in the secondary methods course. In the basketball unit, the participants initially participated in five sequential basketball lessons taught by the course instructor to learn essential basketball skills, tactics, and game rules, as well as task design and teaching strategies. At the end of the participation, we videotaped the participants' playing 10-minute 3 on 3 small-sided games. Next, each participant team or individually taught his/her peers a 30 to 50-minute lesson, which was videotaped. The quantitative data included two investigators' independently coding two taped game plays with the Assessing Basketball Game Performance Competency Rubrics (ABGPCR) and seven taped lessons using the Quality Teaching Assessment Rubrics (QTAR). The qualitative data included descriptive anecdotal records for each lesson, 13 formal interviews, the interview transcripts, and the participants' artifacts.
Analysis/Results
We used an overall mean of the total game performance index to divide seven participants into the high-game performance group and six into the low performance group. The results of the MANOVA yielded a significant difference on the overall teaching between the high- and the low-game performance groups (F=12.02, p<.01). Further, the MANOVA indicated that the high-game performance participants' mean was significantly higher than the low-game performance participants' on instructions (F=4.27, p<.05), management (F=4.36, p<.05) and responses (F=4.75, p<.01), except for task design. Analysis of the qualitative data with the constant comparison technique indicated that the participants with high skill ability more often used correct demonstration and provided precise and related learning cues during instructions, while the participants with low skill ability sometimes did demonstration half-heartedly and rarely provide any learning cues. The high-game performance participants tended to give students complete and clear directions for organizing the class to do a task, compared to their counterparts. Regarding the responses, the participants with strong skill ability re-emphasized the key elements of the task to facilitate a quality practice when needed and provided adequate specific feedback related to an individual's performance, while their counterparts tended to ignore students' incorrect performance and provide positive general feedback no matter how students performed.
Conclusions
The participants with high skill ability in basketball demonstrated more effective teaching practices than their counterparts on three essential teaching dimensions.
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