Sport Education and social goals in physical education: relationships with enjoyment, relatedness, and leisure-time physical activity

Background: Adolescents' decisions to engage in physical activities are influenced by the social aspects of the activity, including opportunity for affiliation, being part of a team, and the social status it offers. A curriculum and instructional model that has been shown to embed the student social system within a positive program of action is Sport Education. Preliminary evidence has suggested that Sport Education challenges social hierarchical groups and promotes more inclusive social goal involvement. Research is required to extend this work and provide a larger-scale empirical analysis of the influence of a Sport Education program on students' social goal involvement in compulsory high-school physical education and examine how these social goals impact important student affective and behavioral outcomes. Purpose: The purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to explore the social goals of high-school physical education students after experiencing a year of Sport Education and (b) to explore the relationships these social goals had with perceptions of enjoyment and relatedness in physical education as well as participation in leisure-time exercise. Participants and setting: A total of 363 10th-grade students from the American Mid-West who had completed a year-long compulsory high-school physical education program taught using Sport Education participated in this study. Data Collection: All students participated in four 25-lesson seasons of team sports-based activity taught using the Sport Education model. Seasons taught included floor hockey, volleyball, team handball, and basketball. All seasons were taught by the same teacher. On completion of the year-long compulsory program, participants completed a questionnaire that included items pertaining to their social goals, relatedness, enjoyment of physical education, and self-reported participation in extra-curricular physical activities. Findings: Data were initially screened for outliers and distribution assumptions were examined. Internal consistency estimates were calculated for all variables except physical activity because it was a single item indicator. Descriptive statistics showed that students who had completed two full semesters of Sport Education had higher than average scores on all three social goals of affiliation, recognition, and status. Findings from the multiple regression analyses revealed the robust contribution that social recognition and social affiliation goals made to students perceived relatedness and enjoyment of physical education. Social recognition and status goals also significantly positively predicted extra-curricular exercise participation. Conclusions: This study provides evidence to suggest that prolonged exposure to the pedagogical features of Sport Education develops students' social bonds by configuring the physical education environment to promote peer social approval for participatory behaviors within the model. These social bonds strongly predicted students' perceived relatedness to peers and their enjoyment of the Sport Education experience. Importantly, these social connections to peers and social standing developed in Sport Education influenced their decision to participate in extra-curricular exercise behaviors.