Browse

Undergraduate research is emphasized as a critical component of today’s science-based undergraduate education and widely accepted as an important part of the overall undergraduate education experience. While educators agree on the value of undergraduate research, significant challenges exist related to the design of the undergraduate research experience and the faculty member’s role in it. Additional challenges include providing high-quality research experiences that benefit the education of a large number of students while maintaining feasibility and cost-effectiveness. The scope of this review is to provide an overview of research and service-learning experiences in kinesiology departments at 3 institutions of higher learning that vary in size and mission.

In this article, the authors honor Catherine D. Ennis’s legacy by highlighting her unique and significant contributions to physical education research on curriculum and instruction. First, they discuss Ennis’s curricular philosophy and her empirical work along her career path. Then they review the major school-based curricular interventions she implemented, including the Movement Education; Sport for Peace; Science, PE and Me!; and The Science of Healthful Living curricula to demonstrate Ennis’s commitment to curricular development in physical education. In this process, they share with the reader Ennis’s contributions to curriculum development theories, curriculum intervention research, and physical education practices.

A major portion of Catherine Ennis’s scholarship and career was devoted to developing culturally relevant physical education curricula for K–12 students. She held a strong conviction that the efficacy of a curriculum lies in its ability to enhance students’ knowledge and skills of most worth for their lives. The approach she adopted for curriculum development is an evidence-supported curriculum-design process through which a curriculum is put to the rigorous process of intervention research to determine its efficacy. In this article the authors reflect on the experiences they had with her in these curriculum interventions, share the ideas and practices in the research as Ennis envisioned, and discuss challenges and solutions in conducting large-scale, school-based curriculum intervention studies.

This paper introduces the special issue of Kinesiology Review addressing the legacy of Catherine D. Ennis. The introduction first provides a brief chronology of her life and discusses her career, focusing on her many professional activities and honors. It then provides a short review of her early scholarship as a basis for understanding how her scholarly career began. This is followed by an overview of this issue, which reviews the various phases of Ennis’s career with papers by scholars who have helped produce and use her research and ends with an epilogue of personal reflections by Ennis’s colleagues and friends.

A large body of Catherine Ennis’s work is focused on physical education curriculum development. Her approach to curriculum development is unique in that it is completely based on research evidence. The curricula she developed have been field-tested and the completed curriculum is supported with solid research evidence to demonstrate its efficacy in student learning and teacher ease of use. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview and explore opportunities to continue large-scale physical education curriculum intervention studies. The authors first provide a brief review of previous intervention studies by summarizing the findings and discussing implications. They then discuss potential future intervention studies by presenting several topics that are being explored by researchers in current interventions. Finally, they focus on methodology issues involved in designing effective curriculum intervention studies with the idea of adaptive designs as variations of the randomized clinical trial design.