The Impact of Sport Education on Chinese Physical Education Majors' Volleyball Content Knowledge and Performance

Purpose: The preparation of Chinese physical education teachers focuses strongly on movement competence and the development of knowledge about rules and techniques. What is missing are experiences that promote expertise in task design and progressions. The purpose of this study was to examine if participation in classes following the Sport Education model could enhance content expertise by placing students in situations where they were responsible for these tasks. Methods: One hundred and ten physical education majors from a university in central China participated in a semester-long course of volleyball taught using either Traditional Instruction or Sport Education. Pre- and post-course measures were recorded of participants' game performance, common content knowledge (CCK), and specialized content knowledge (SCK). Results: After controlling for pre-intervention scores, statistically significant differences were evident in the posttest scores between the instructional groups for all three measures. The binomial logistic regression model to ascertain the effect of course type on the likelihood that students would reach the benchmark depth of SCK produced statistical significance. Students in the Sport Education classes had 6.67 times higher odds to reach the benchmark than students in the Traditional Instruction classes. Conclusion: The accountability mechanisms specific to Sport Education that have been shown to enhance student motivation and promote knowledge and performance seemed to carry over into this setting. As students in Sport Education were responsible for designing much of their team training, this served to promote their ability to design and sequence tasks based on their team's needs. Implications for physical education teacher education are discussed.