Game Performance and Understanding Within a Hybrid Sport Education Season

The impact of a hybrid Sport Education-Invasion Games Competence Model (IGCM) unit of instruction on students' game performance and game understanding in soccer was examined in this study. Pre- and posttest measures were collected from one fifth grade class of students (n = 24, mean age 10.3) residing in Portugal during a 17-lesson unit of instruction (season). Students' game performance during multiple 10-min long matches was assessed using the coding instrument of Blomqvist, Vanttinen, and Luhtanen (2005). An author developed game understanding test was used to assess knowledge on decision making and skill execution. Performance differences between males and females were examined using the Mann-Whitney test and student improvement pre- to poststudy was examined using the Wilcoxon test. The combined application of Sport Education (authentic learning environment) and the IGCM (with learning tasks focused on the specific tactical-content and skills of soccer) promoted improvements in students' game performance and understanding, and increments on the correlations between both constructs.