Scheduled for Pedagogy Posters, Wednesday, March 31, 2004, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Convention Center: Exhibit Hall Poster Session


Implementation and Effectiveness of the Integrated Curriculum in Physical Class

Xiangren Yi, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI

A national reform calls for integrating and / or making connections among the curriculum at the public school level. The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) (1997) required an integrated and multidisciplinary curriculum with a focus on learning experiences that crossed traditional lines. The topic teamwork model (Christie, 2000) and the webbed model (Payne & Rink, 1997) had suggested that physical education should develop appropriate curriculum that integrated with science, music, language arts, social study, arts, and mathematic, etc. The purpose of this study was to create an integrated curriculum that encourage integrative teaching from the different subject areas and investigate the implementation and effectiveness of an integrated curriculum and whether this increased student learning and engagement by a cooperative and well-structured effort. A curriculum that consisted of sport, fitness, health, dance, music, science, language arts, mathematics, arts, social studies, etc., would meet national standards and current trends for physical education classes. Participants were an expert middle school teacher and 60 students. An integrated curriculum provided by a researcher was utilized for six weeks. There are 35 boys and 25 girls in eight grades. The data was collected by structured and semi structured interviews, questionnaire, and teacher observations. Teacher Satisfaction survey and informal interviews were used to collected teacher’s opinions about the implementation of the integrated curriculum into his class. Open-ended questions solicited students’ opinions what they liked about PE and their beliefs about engagement, interest, teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction and achievement etc. in the integrated curriculum compared to the regular curriculum. Those interviews and open-ended questions were coded and analyzed by creating categories. The result indicated that (a) An integrated curriculum greatly increased students learning experiences, (b) it provided more knowledge, concepts, skills, and actions for students and yielded a significant difference in the level of students’ engagement (25%), interest (50%), interaction (63.5%) and achievement (20.5%), (c) the integrated curriculum facilitated learner’s development of knowledge, spirit of inquiry, creativity and conceptual understanding compared to previous regular physical education classes, (d) the integrated curriculum meet national standard and was suited to a new developmental trend for designing student appropriate classes for physical education in 21st century. The result suggested that physical educators should make an effort to develop integrated curriculum for physical education to improve the quality of physical education classes in the future.
Keyword(s): curriculum development, interdisciplinary, performance

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