Background/Purpose An integrated recreational sport and exercise activity training program has been founded by U.S. Department of Education for young adults with disabilities since Fall 2009. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of this program on training young adults with disabilities in Spring 2010.
Method An action research design was employed in this study in which young adults were trained sport and exercise activities in a naturalistic setting. Participants were 55 young adults with disabilities who were served as trainees, and 55 university students without disabilities who were served as trainers, which formed an integrated training setting. Each trainee was trained three self-initiated wiffle ball activities (pitching, batting, and catching) and three self-initiated workout activities (flexibility, muscular endurance, and aerobic). All trainees participated in 20 training sessions with 2 sessions per week over 10 weeks in Spring 2010. Among 55 participants, 39 participants had valid data available. The data were analyzed in both visual inspection and analysis of variance.
Analysis/Results The results of visual inspection indicated that the data pattern of each of the six activities showed a gradually increased trend over the sessions. The results of using analysis of variance indicated significant statistical differences existing between the first session and the last session on each of the six activities.
Conclusions These findings revealed that the integrated recreational sport and exercise activity program was effective in training young adults with disabilities wiffle ball and workout activities. This study is supported by a grant fund by U.S. Department of Education (H128J090007).