|
COPYRIGHT 2007 University of South Alabama
Using a cognitive mediational paradigm (Doyle, 1977; Lee & Solmon, 1992) as a framework, the role of the teacher, rather than being a transmitter of information, is characterized as structuring the learning environment in such a way that individuals in the class will think and act in ways that enable them to learn. Providing feedback to students as they learn motor skills has been identified as an important variable in the teaching and learning process (Magill, 2000), but research that has investigated the role of feedback in physical education classes has not produced consistent findings (Lee, Keh, & Magill, 1993). It is important to learn more about how teachers can effectively use feedback to create learning environments that will enable students to learn, and the focus of this study is to use achievement goal theory as a framework to investigate students' preferences for teacher feedback.
Achievement Goal Theory
Achievement goal theory has dominated research in motivation in sport and exercise over the last decade (Roberts, 2001). Goal theory (Nicholls, 1989) assumes that individuals enter achievement settings with the desire to demonstrate competence, and asserts the existence of two dimensions of goals, task and ego. Individuals who have task goals demonstrate competence through personal improvement and/or mastery of a task, while individuals who have ego goals demonstrate competence through means of social comparison. Consequently, when goals are ego-involved, the only way for an individual to be successful is by outperforming others. When an individual has task goals, however, success is internally referenced according to personal improvement rather than being defined in reference to others.
Individuals enter achievement settings with dispositions towards different goals, but there is evidence that teachers can manipulate the class environment to foster either task or ego-involved goals (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Solmon, 1996). There is considerable support in the literature (see Biddle, 2001; Roberts, 2001; Treasure, 2001 for reviews) for the notion that a task-involved environment is preferable to an ego-involved environment, as students in task climates demonstrate a more adaptive pattern of behavior. That is, they are more likely to exert effort, persist in the face of difficulty, and select challenging tasks. With that established, identifying ways in which teachers can foster a task-involved climate becomes an important line of research. Several researchers have used a series of structures developed by Epstein (1989) outlined by the acronym TARGET (Task, Authority, Recognition, Grouping, Evaluation, and Timing) in intervention studies designed to foster task-involvement (Solmon, 1996; Theeboom, DeKnop, & Weiss, 1995; Treasure & Roberts, 2001), but there has been very little focus on how teachers can use feedback to foster a task climate.
Feedback
Task- and ego-involved climates promote different patterns of information seeking (Butler, 1992, 1993). Under task-involved climates, people seek information that will conform to their goal of learning and mastering a task. On the other hand, people in ego-involved climates are in favor of social comparison information. A series of studies by Butler have demonstrated that the kinds of information students seek are dependent on their goal orientations (1992, 1993) and conceptions of ability (1999, 2000). Students with entity views of ability were more likely to favor normative feedback which provides evaluative information about their ability relative to others. In contrast, those with incremental views of ability were more attentive to temporal feedback related to their personal improvement and mastery.
The nature of feedback that teachers provide in physical education classes is typically identified as an important variable in the creation of the class climate (Lee, et al., 1993), but much remains to be learned about how physical education teachers can use feedback effectively. Silverman, Woods, and Subramaniam (1998) investigated the motivational role of augmented feedback in skill acquisition. The amount of time that students engaged in practice during class was related to the appropriateness of the feedback provided by the teachers. This suggests...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
