Blended teaching to improve the mood state and motor performance skills of student-athletes in softball: A randomized-controlled trial

Abstract

The implementation of blended teaching in physical education has increased significantly, but there was a lack of evidence about its effectiveness in improving mood state and motor performance skills in student-athletes, which became a gap in this study. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of blended teaching as an effort to improve mood state and motor performance skills of student-athletes both males and females in softball subject matter. Participants in this study were student-athletes from Mancak 1 junior high school (Indonesia). There was 41 participants had been allocated in control group (n = 21) and blended teaching (n = 20). The profile of mood state scale was used to measure the level of mood while the test of gross motor development-2 function was used to measure the motor performance skills of student-athletes. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to test the difference in values for each variable. Based on the study results, we observed that there was no difference in the scores of mood state and motor performance skills in male and female between control group and blended teaching group at the baseline (p ≥ 0.05). However, the second finding found contrasting differences between the control and blended teaching groups in male and female in terms of mood state scores and motor performance skills at the post-intervention stage (p ≤ 0.05). The third finding shows that blended teaching has a much larger effect size compared to the control group (full-online). Thus, we emphasize that blended teaching is an innovation in teaching softball in physical education classes that has proven to be effective in replacing full-online teaching.