The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of the sports education model and the direct teaching model used in badminton courses on the attitudes of undergraduate students towards the course and its permanence on cognitive domain skills. The study group consisted of a total of 45 undergraduate students, 24 of whom were experimental groups and 21 were control groups. In the study, for collection of data, the "Intrinsic Motivation Inventory" which developed by Ryan (2000), adapted to Turkish by Çaliskur after being tested for validity and reliability (Çaliskur & Demirhan, 2013) and the "Badminton Cognitive Domain Information Form" which was prepared by the course instructor were used. Descriptive statistical analysis was used for data analysis of attitudes of groups after application, but, because of the lack of a normal distribution, the "Mann Whitney U" test was used for the significance of the difference between the cognitive domain and the permanence of learning. As a result, significant differences were determined between the students' interest/enjoyment aspect and the permanence of cognitive learning, whereas significant differences were not detected in the aspects of perceived competence, value/benefit, effort/importance, job perception/perceived choice and pressure/tension.