Volleyball Expertise Content Knowledge Study (VECKS)

Research foci

Critical to the selection of instructional tasks, is teacher understanding of the relationship among tasks. In its simplest form this might be seen as the sequence of instructional tasks designed to teach a skill or a particular objective. A longstanding criticism of teaching physical education has been the absence of sequence of instructional tasks that relate to on another. This is a common challenge in other subject matters as well. For example, Ma (1999) examined how Chinese and American elementary teachers taught mathematical concepts. She reported that Chinese teachers explained and taught their content relationally while American teachers viewed their content discretely.

In this study we want to examine the relational understanding that teachers with different experience with the content of volleyball have.Our use of the term relational refers to both the sequence of tasks and the interconnection of tasks moving toward the game like context. Relational knowledge in physical education requires a deeper understanding of the content. In this study we have designed three activities to be conducted in an interview to assess CCK, SCK and relational knowledge of teachers.

Research Summary

We are conducting a series of one-on-one interviews with participants who are members for four groups:

• Students in the first year of their teacher education program n=30
• Students in the last year of their teacher education program. n=30
• Teachers who have been teaching for at least 8 years and have taught volleyball during that time. n=30
• Teachers who are considered expert teacher of volleyball. n=30

Each interview will consist of three parts

Part 1: Participants will be asked to create a content map for the teaching of volleyball in middle school.

Part 2: Participants will be asked 20 questions focused on CCK and SCK for volleyball

Part 3: Participants will view three  .5 to 1.5 minute vignettes of volleyball performance and they will answer questions about the video.

Theoretical assumptions

• PCK can be observed in (a) the description of the task a teacher provides.
• PCK exists on continuums of maturity and effectiveness and this can be measured
• Content knowledge and in particular, specialized content knowledge is a very strong predictor of PCK.
• Our work is grounded in applied behavior analysis.