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Scholarship related to physical education and sport pedagogy is rigorous and should be central to the academic discipline of kinesiology. The goal of this article is to situate physical education and sport pedagogy as an applied field in kinesiology, grounded in the assumption that physical education, as the professional or technical application of the broader academic discipline, is of critical importance to the success of kinesiology. A brief overview of the history of research on teaching physical education is followed by an overview of the streams of research that have evolved. Major tenets of research on effective teaching and curricular reform are discussed. The status of physical education teacher education and school physical education programs is considered, and a rationale for a broader view of pedagogy that has the potential not only to promote physical education and sport pedagogy but also to enrich the academic discipline is offered.

The traditional sport-based multiactivity approach that continues to dominate secondary physical education curricula is problematic on a number of levels. It is often not perceived as making a valuable contribution to the educational process by school administrators or as culturally relevant and interesting to many students. This paper highlights Catherine Ennis’s work related to the shortcomings of this model and the need to move toward a more educational focus. Initially, Ennis described the curricular strife that developed as teachers clung to this approach in the face of a changing educational landscape. Her work evolved to include students’ perspectives, and her writings gave voice to their disengagement and discontent. She continued her extensive writings related to this topic across her career, exploring alternatives and offering solutions to reconceptualize physical education programs to maximize their contribution to the school curriculum and to meet the needs of all students.

Academic integrity is a fundamental value, and maintaining it is central to achieving the mission of providing high-quality instructional programs. Cheating in academic settings is a widespread problem, and the perception is that the proliferation of technology in recent years has compounded this concern. This paper provides an overview of the issues related to academic dishonesty and the problems associated with cheating on college campuses. Academic misconduct in online courses and programs is discussed, and a variety of ways that technology can be used by students to cheat are described. Strategies are offered that can be used to decrease cheating and promote ethical behavior. It is the responsibility of faculty and administrators to take steps to deter academic misconduct and to strive to create a culture of academic integrity.

This study explored the cognitive responses of adapted physical education teachers during lesson planning. The focus was to determine whether expert (n=4) and novice (n=4) teachers varying in experience and expertise differ in the information they need to plan a lesson and how they conceptualize a lesson. Subjects were given information about a fictional class of handicapped students and were asked to plan a lesson. After writing a lesson plan, they were asked to explain it to the experimenter. The results provided clear evidence of the experienced teachers’ superior knowledge base and repertoire of teaching strategies. Their responses were filled with contingency plans based on the actions and abilities exhibited by the students. In contrast, the novices generated plans that were unidirectional and failed to accommodate the range of ability levels in the class.

In this study, relationships between entry characteristics, in-class behavior, self-report measures of student cognition, and achievement during motor skill instruction were examined. Fifty-six sixth-grade students participated in a 4-day instructional unit on the forearm pass in volleyball. All classes were videotaped to code in-class behavior. Data collection included skill pretest and posttest, Harter’s Perceived Competence Scale, forms about the errors made during practice, and a Cognitive Processes Questionnaire (CPQ). Correlates of achievement, as reflected by residual gain scores, were perceived competence, student reports of attention, and variables indicating the quality of practice. Relationships between entry characteristics, in-class behavior, and measures of cognition were evaluated using canonical correlational analyses, and these relationships suggest that entry characteristics are important factors in how students interact in achievement settings. The results of this study show that investigating the complex relationships between these sets of variables can yield results that clarify how students effectively mediate instruction.

Recently, national studies have reported on young people’s low level of participation in physical activity. Because the effect of gender and racial differences among youth participating in physical activity have not been sufficiently addressed, examining the social construction of the body in physical education can provide valuable insights. This study uses poststructuralism as a lens to investigate how students’ construction of meanings around the body varied by gender and race, and how bodily meanings related to students’ participation in physical education classes. The participants were 528 students from public high schools. An instrument was used to assess students’ racial and gendered construction of bodily meanings around specific discursive constructs. Results indicated that students’ meanings differ by race and gender, especially in regard to size, power, muscularity, and appearance. These findings suggest that bodily meanings were influential in students’ self-reported levels of participation in physical education classes.

The study of the social construction of the body has become crucial to contemporary academic discourses in education and physical education. Employing feminist poststructuralist theory and a qualitative ethnographic design, this study investigated how high school students identified themselves with images of bodies drawn from fitness and sports magazines, and how their body narratives were linked to their participation in physical education. Students’ body narratives reflected notions of comfortable, bad, and borderland bodies that influenced students’ physical activity choices and engagement in physical education. Girls’ narratives of their physicality were found to be significantly less comfortable than boys’. Critical pedagogy to destabilize gendered dominant discourses of mass media body culture and to develop positive, meaningful, and empowering student physicality is discussed.

Recently, the lack of physical activity and increasing rates of childhood obesity have received a great deal of attention in the United States. One way to combat inactivity in children is to utilize physical education programs as a means to promote active lifestyles. There is not, however, a consensus concerning how physical education programs can achieve the goal of increasing children’s physical activity patterns. The purpose of this review is to examine motivational constructs that can provide a theoretical framework to identify strategies that can be used in physical education classes to promote engagement in physical activity. Self-determination theory is offered as a framework that has the potential to integrate these motivational constructs and provide a more complete understanding of how practitioners can structure learning environments to foster motivation and engagement in activity. Suggestions are made for implementing the research into practice, as well as future research directions.

Physical activity participation is linked with many benefits including a reduction in anxiety; it is, however, also important to explore aspects of activity that incite anxiety. One way to investigate sources of anxiety in physical activity is to use the critical incident technique (CIT). The purpose of this study was to explore anxiety-inducing events in physical activity settings and to evaluate the impact on future behavior. A total of 122 participants (M = 21.23 ± 1.77 years) completed an online survey asking when a physical activity setting incited anxiety using the CIT. Four common sources of anxiety were evident in the responses: fragile self-beliefs, social interaction and the threat of negative social evaluation, competition, and a lack of knowledge or unfamiliarity with surroundings. Tenets from achievement goal theory can help to explain the incitement of anxiety and can help shape physical activity settings to be more inclusive and welcoming for all.