Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Physical Education Requirements and Student Academic Achievement in High School(2015) Kim, Sang Min; Valli, Linda R.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although national recommendations and guidelines have called for schools to play a greater role in enhancing physical activity through physical education to prevent sedentary lifestyles or physical inactivity of children and adolescents, many schools have reduced or eliminated physical education time or programs despite state or district mandates. These policies and practices are often part of schools’ efforts to increase students’ standardized test scores given the pressures of accountability reforms in education. Guided by Argyris and Schön’s (1974) theory of action, the effectiveness of schools’ policies and practices of decreasing or eliminating physical education time or programs to improve students’ academic achievement was tested in this study. In particular, this study aimed to examine the relationship between schools’ physical education graduation requirements and students’ academic achievement growth in reading, mathematics, and science in high school settings. To this end, the study used a multilevel analysis from a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. high schoolers from the NELS database. Results showed that time requirements of physical education for graduation were either positively or neutrally related to student academic achievement growth in mathematics and science while time requirements of physical education for graduation had only a neutral relation to student academic achievement growth in reading, after controlling for student, family, and school characteristics. Also, there were gender differences in the relations between time requirements of physical education for graduation and student academic achievement growth in mathematics and science with no gender difference found in reading. Overall, although there was not strong evidence that more time requirements of physical education for graduation were associated with higher student academic achievement growth, the findings of this study indicate that certain time requirements of physical education for graduation are positively associated with student academic achievement growth especially in mathematics and science. The findings of the study further imply that increased time requirements schools set aside for physical education for graduation do not decrease or compromise student academic achievement growth in the three core high school subjects.Item Complicating the Phenomenological Conversation of Basketball as an En-gendered Life Course(2012) Sotudeh, Kasra; Hultgren, Francine; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This hermeneutic phenomenological study explores the lived experience of basketball in the lives of collegiate women who claim to be scholar-athletes. The scholar-athletes were invited to unpack their scholastic and athletic life stories, not just as a mode of relevance for communicating with others, but more significantly, as a way of transacting what is embedded within their memories via the written narrative form. Through the corporeal, temporal, spatial, and relational moments in basketball the meaning of the lived experience is illuminated. The question that compels my study is: What is the lived experience of basketball in the lives of collegiate women who claim to be scholar-athletes? The philosophic works of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty provide the foundation for this lived experience study. The "grounding" that each of these philosophers impart is used to penetrate the hermeneutic nature of basketball as "play" via autobiographical application. Furthermore, van Manen's phenomenological process provides a platform of engagement and writing through the reflective practice of Pinar's currere method as a mode for slowing down the lived experience of play. A group of eight former women basketball players who identified themselves as scholar-athletes were the participants in this study through a 15-week course entitled EDPS 488B: Complicating the Conversation of Basketball as a Life Course. By analyzing their lived accounts of basketball through a variety of literary means, each scholar-athlete was able to gradually build her own autobiographical written narrative of basketball in relation to the social, political, and intellectual contexts of curriculum as lived. In this process, I develop a philosophical approach to examining the significance of sport though a revalidation of seasoned becoming, a transformation of athletic feat into scholarly thought, a deliberation of unrehearsed narrative, and a recognition of never-ending sanctity. Setting a scholarly life course into athletic motion suggests themes encompassing the challenge of bringing the body and mind into an even playing field, the return to a moment when identities were merely playful and time simply stood still, the value of the sporting space on the athlete's sense of community development, and the enlightenment of the self through the other via the discipline of heart and mind. Drawing from the insights I gained from my participants, I suggest that the praxis of sports as a life course is reliant upon curricular transformation and not the isolation of academics from athletics. The notion of irrelevance has trapped our mindset into the anxiety of wanting to be accepted. For scholar-athletes and a multitude of other hyphenated forms of human existence, anxiety hovers over an ever-changing becoming, almost fooling the being out of existence and into an artificial realm of acceptance. Scholar-athletes can serve as powerful role models within society, and hence, their lived experience is consistently challenged by their actions. The currere process not only tells the scholarly story of athletic lives, but it allows others in the broader community to engage in the practice of complicated conversations from a variety of perspectives, both within and beyond the boundaries of the sporting space.