Background: Millions of American children are participating in fitness testing in school-based physical education (PE) programs. However, practitioners and researchers in the field of PE have questioned the need for regular or mandatory youth fitness testing. This was partly because a significant improvement in youth fitness and physical activity…

Background: To date, most of the work done by those who do research in adapted sport pedagogy (a sub-discipline of sport pedagogy focused on modified forms of physical education that address the needs of pupils with disabilities) has focused on the experience of pupils with disabilities and relatively little work has examined the difficulties…

Background: Research on social skills in physical education has shown that students' fair play behaviors remain underdeveloped unless teachers include social skills instruction into the curriculum. Fair play behaviors are learned behaviors that are specific to the context of physical education and sport, and may generalize to other settings. One…

Background: While there are numerous claims that physical activity promotes positive youth development, there is a need for more empirical research in this area. Many qualitative studies suggest a relationship between a youth development orientation and participants' attitudes and behaviors in physical activity programs. A quantitative analysis of…

Background: Field dependence-independence (FDI) is a tendency to rely on external frames (given situations and authoritative people) or internal frames (oneself, including one's own body) for one's information processing and behavior. Literature has constantly reported that field-dependent (FD) individuals, who are less autonomous in…

Background: Many of the issues relating to game performance of students found in the physical education literature can be considered a failure of generalization from practices to games, and from games to games. However, no study in secondary physical education has examined generalization effects as a result of effective game pedagogy in the…

Background: Despite criticism of its positive claims being largely unfounded and ill-clarified, the concept of mentoring has come into common use within sports coaching. Purpose: In an attempt to address these concerns, the purpose of this paper is to take better account of the researched evidence on mentoring in general before providing some…

Background: The literature on motivation suggests that student learning and performance is influenced by the motivational climate, and that positive benefits can be derived from exposure to a mastery motivational climate. Nonetheless, to date, only a few studies have attempted to investigate a mastery motivational climate in a naturalistic setting…

Background: The ecology of physical education is created through the interaction of three task systems: managerial task system, instructional task system, and the student social system. Within the ecological framework tasks are presented and task development is influenced by concepts such as ambiguity, risk, and accountability. Teachers' and…

Background: It is widely reported that adolescence is a critical period in the development of the self. Indeed many studies identify that physical self-perceptions formed at this period are able to determine engagement in and levels of physical activity. Although the investigation of physical self-perceptions in British adolescents has been…

Background: Preservice teachers' beliefs and values develop during their K-12 "apprenticeship of observation" and filter both compatible and incompatible ideas about teaching and learning. Preservice teacher education has been suggested as a critical period for examining beliefs about teaching and learning. Case methods may be one curricular tool…

Background: Physical educators are faced with trying to provide motivating and enjoyable experiences in physical education. Sport Education is an instructional model that aims to provide positive motivational sport experiences by simulating the features of authentic sport. Research support for Sport Education is positive, however, the effects on…

Background: In recent years within the UK the inclusion of children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream physical education (PE) has escalated up the statutory and political agenda. Despite this increased focus in schools, empirical research demonstrates that inequalities still exist in relation to the readiness of government,…

Background: The motivation of physical education (PE) teachers has received precious little attention over the years. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a salient theoretical model for understanding motivation, and posits that self-determined motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation) stems from the perceived fulfillment of three psychological needs:…

Background: Recent research into coaching has been critical of much previous work, particularly in terms of the tendency to paint a rather unproblematic portrayal of the activity. The criticism has focussed on the erroneous supposition that method can be substituted for individuals, thus giving a synthetic account of a most messy of jobs.…