Despite the growing interest of technology integration (TI) in physical education, little research has compared students’ perceptions when offering similar interventions with and without TI.
The purpose of this study was to compare how three cohorts of college students experienced a 16-week class of futsal (official name of indoor soccer), taught using three different methodologies. Two groups were taught using the key principles of the Sport Education (SE) model. One of these groups was taught with TI as students contributed to the construction of a wiki; while the other group was taught without any TI. The third group (also without any TI) was taught with a traditional format, i.e. focusing on drills to develop fundamental motor skills of the game.
Method:
Throughout each condition, all 80 college students (57M, 23 F) from the three groups completed weekly critical incident cards, in which they were asked to comment upon their perceptions of the most significant event in class that week. In addition, at the end of the semester, all students completed a 18-question questionnaire composed by 16 five-point Likert-type scale questions and two open-ended questions. The questionnaire asked about students’ perceptions in regards to their overall enjoyment and learning.
Analysis/Results:
A total of 630 critical incidents were recorded. Accumulative data that registered the same concepts in the critical incident cards were used to generate themes that were able to explain the major reasons why students liked or disliked each teaching condition. The main findings here were that each cohort of student advocated for the strengths of the teaching condition they experienced. Examples included the positive responses towards competitiveness of the SE groups, and the ability to train specific skills in the traditional format. No substantive differences were reported by the SE students who participated with or without TI.
Analysis of variance were conducted using the questionnaire data to compare student responses across the groups. No significant differences were recorded across the treatment groups due to consistently high means and low variance scores. That is, all students reported high self-perception levels of learning and enjoyment in all teaching conditions.
Conclusions:
These findings reinforce that despite students’ high interest in technology; TI may not be justifiable in some scenarios as students’ learning and enjoyment perception did not improve. Moreover, blending different teaching conditions may be beneficial as students reported high interest in drills.