Inter-observer evaluation of practical lesson delivery in physical education setting: Nature and demonstration of teachers’ instructional cues

Abstract

Often, teachers plan for instructional activities, yet fail to plan for instructional cues they would use to facilitate skill acquisition among students. During practical lesson delivery, it is ideal for instructional cue (IC) of the teacher to be short, descriptive and integrated in a manner that promotes students' retention of relevant information for executing the skill correctly. Teachers should avoid lengthy and unnecessary ICs in teaching and learning environment. In this pedagogical study, we used descriptive processes to investigate the nature and demonstration of teachers' ICs, the proportion and rate per minute of teachers' ICs in practical physical education (PE) setting involving pre-service teachers (n=77) and professional PE teachers (n=4). Self-developed event recording instrument was found valid using expert consultation procedure. In each recorded event, inter-observer agreement was above 80% which indicated a good reliability of data for making research decisions. Evaluation of the video-recorded lesson suggested that teachers were able to utilise a variety of instructional cues (i.e., short, descriptive and integrated) to facilitate students' learning in practical PE setting. Findings indicated that teachers were largely able to simulate skills and techniques during practical lesson delivery. Again, verbal instructional cues demonstrated with equipment occupied the largest proportion of events, while verbal instructional cues demonstrated without equipment placed second. Non-verbal instructional cues demonstrated without equipment occupied the least proportion of events in the entire observation. Generally, the study revealed a normal phenomenon in practical PE setting where verbal cues occurred more frequently than non-verbal cues. The practical PE class is usually composed of high and low prior learners. It was recommended that cues delivered by the teacher should cater for such individual differences in every practical PE setting.