Physical education teachers' behaviors as related to pupils' psychosocial development in curricular and extracurricular settings.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether teachers' behaviors related to pupils' psychosocial development would differ when physical education teachers taught curricular physical education lessons and when they coached extracurricular school teams. Subjects were 22 physical education teachers who taught and coached basketball in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. One physical education lesson on basketball and one basketball practice were videotaped for each subject. These tapes were then coded for frequency of teachers' reactive and spontaneous behaviors with the Coaching Behavior Assessment System. A one-way analysis of variance test indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the rates teachers used all behaviors during lessons and practices. Hotelling-Lawley trace tests and subsequent repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance indicated that teachers provided significantly higher rates of punitive mistake-contingent technical instruction, general technical instruction, and general encouragement during extracurricular practices and used a significantly higher rate of behaviors aimed at keeping control during curricular lessons. Unlike previous research on skill-related behaviors, the results did not indicate that teachers' performance suffered dramatically during curricular lessons when compared with performance in extracurricular practices.