Students’ Autobiographical Memory of Participation in Multiple Sport Education Seasons

Abstract

This study examines the recollections of the Sport Education experiences of a cohort of students (15 boys and 19 girls) who had participated in seasons of basketball, soccer and badminton across grades six through eight (average age at data collection = 15.6 years). Using autobiographic memory theory techniques, the students completed surveys and interviews that asked them to recall what they remembered about the Sport Education seasons in which they had participated. Student responses were mostly from the “general” and more precise “event specific” levels of recall, and their strongest and most detailed memories were of those features that provide Sport Education participants with what is termed authentic experiences. For example, Sport Education was considered different from regular physical education in that it was more serious and organized. Further, students claimed they had a deeper understanding of these sports as a result of their participation, and in particular, as a result of their officiating roles. The findings provide evidence that the features of affiliation, authentic competition and perceived learning that students find so attractive, last well beyond initial exposure to the model, and that future delivery of the model should strongly adhere to these basic tenets.

“I just remember rugby”: Re-membering Physical Education as More Than a Sport

“…However, the decision to use this methodological approach was deliberate, and A1 was positioned in the data-gathering phase as a "cue" in the retrieval process, a link between present and past (Boyer, 2009;Williams & Conway, 2009). Indeed, in a similar vein to Sinelnikov and Hastie (2010) in their work on AM, the teacher in this study was also one of the researchers (cf. Sinelnikov & Hastie, 2008).…”

“…In one of the first studies to use AM in PE, Sinelnikov and Hastie (2010) explored students' AMs of PE through their engagement in multiple seasons of sport education. The participants' strongest and most detailed memories were of the specific events and salient features of the model such as working in teams, awards and certificates, officiating, and training, practicing, and playing.…”

“…Sinelnikov & Hastie, 2010), this subtheme illustrates an idea of PE as just doing games where the purpose was for boys to try different sports. Moreover, enjoyment of the game is the valued outcome of the lesson (cf.…”

Editorial: Em defesa da língua portuguesa

“…These measures included pre-post test inventories (e.g., perceived autonomy support (118) ), surveys (e.g., examining the autobiographical memories of students' experiences of three years of participation in SE (104) ), questionnaires (e.g., basic psychological needs and sportsmanship (73) ), or used the situational intrinsic motivation scale (95; e.g., 102,106,119) .…”

“…According to Clarke and Quill (17) , the SE model gave pupils a more authentic and less abstracted learning experience, which has improved their understanding and performance in games and gymnastics. Conversely, although taken in reference to students' participation in consecutive seasons of SE involving team sports, the studies of Wallhead, Garn, and Vidoni (116) , Wallhead, Garn, Vidoni, and Youngberg (117) , and Sinelnikov and Hastie (104) were based on pre-post test surveys and on data collected in one moment in time after the participants' enrolment in SE. As a limitation in these studies no examination was conducted on the development of the teaching--learning process that might shed light on the whys and hows associated with the findings.…”