Study Quality Concepts the Most Acceptable To First-Year Students of Bachelor Studies in Physical Education at Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences and In Other Programmes of Pedagogy

Abstract

The article continues the discussion started in the Sport Science journal about how future teachers of physical education understand quality studies. In order to achieve quality studies and its improvement, it is very important what study quality concepts the community of a higher education pursues. The real improvement of the quality of studies occurs when study quality concepts are known and pursued by all the members of the academic community, and students as well. Therefore, the problem is raised regarding what study quality expectations young people have when beginning their studies. The objective of the article is to reveal what study quality concepts are most acceptable to the fist-year students of bachelor studies in physical education at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences. The object of the article is the acceptability of quality concepts. The research was conducted from the November of 2012 to the December of 2013, with the participation of 133 students who study bachelor degree programme in physical education and 193 first year students of pedagogy trend: 57 students from the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences and 62 from the institution of the higher education A (further in the text IHE A) and 74 from the institution of the higher education b (further in the text IHE b). The method of questionnaire survey was used when during the survey the fist-year students were asked to rank 7 quality concepts when 1 marks the acceptable one and 7 marks the least acceptable one. The analysis of the gathered data was performed by using the 22.0 version of SSPS adapted for Windows operating system. Descriptive statistics and the Mann-Whitney nonparametric criterion were used. When comparing the answers of these fist-year students with the rankings provided by other students pair frequency tables were used and the Mann-Whitney criterion on the basis of the level of statistical significance of 0.05 (p≤ 0.05). The analysis of the research data shows that the most acceptable study quality concepts for the first year students of bachelor studies in physical education at Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences are “Quality is the achievement of the set goals” and “Quality is the satisfaction of the consumer needs” (motivated wishes and opinion of the students, and public perceptions are taken into consideration). The study quality concept “Quality is the change (continuous changes are occurring in the institution)” is of medium acceptability, whereas three study quality concepts are less than of medium acceptability: “Study quality as continuous improvement (continuous process of the improvement of studies)”; “compliance with the requirements”; and “Perfection”. The least acceptable concept is “Quality when the best results are achieved at least expense”. Keywords: first-year students of bachelor studies in physical education, first-year students of programmes in pedagogy, study quality concepts. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/sm.2015.4