Date of Award

12-2016

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Child Development

Department

Psychology

First Reader/Committee Chair

Wilcox, Amanda

Abstract

One area of development that can be facilitated in the context of youth sports and physical education is sociomoral development. Sociomoral development is defined as moral development in the context of social groups. The physical education classroom today lacks the content, structure, and teaching style that middle school students need in order to cement their sociomoral development so that they can experience positive developmental growth as they mature into adulthood. The purpose of this project was to educate future physical education teachers about the importance of including sociomoral development activities in their standard PE curricula. The presentation focused on teaching how to deliver a curriculum that implements games and activities with dialogue and reflection. These games and activities are then infused with team sports, giving students multiple opportunities to build a close knit connection with their classmates and advance their sociomoral development. In order to test the effectiveness of the presentation, a pre and posttest was used. The pretest and posttest contained a number of open ended questions and a fixed 20 item questionnaire which was divided into five different categories. The five categories were: P.E and prosocial behavior, Theory of structural development, Teacher’s role in sociomoral development, logistics of a sociomoral curriculum, and moral competence activities. Results indicated very slight increase in mean scores moving from pretest to posttest in all but one category. The moral competence category showed a modest increase in mean score moving from pretest to posttest indicating that participants did learn in this part of the presentation. Results from the open ended questions indicated that participants had existing knowledge of sociomoral development learned previously; however they learned new knowledge pertaining to how to structure a sociomoral curriculum through the scope of structural development style teaching. Future sociomoral curricula should emphasize as much active learning as possible, since this type of learning creates a stronger bond between sports and academia.

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