Associate Professor S.M. Lukina¹
Dr.Hab., Professor Yu.Ya. Lobanov²
PhD, Associate Professor A.V. Sharonova³
PhD, Associate Professor L.V. Yarchikovskaya¹
PhD, Associate Professor O.V. Mironova^1
1Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg
²Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg
³Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, St. Petersburg

Keywords: physical education, students, healthy lifestyle, model, innovative technologies.

Background. Modern innovative technologies facilitate progress both in professional sports and academic physical education service, boost the students' interest in and motivations for the trainings and improve their physical qualities and skills [1, p.67; 3, p.122]. The academic physical education service quality largely depends on the physical education process design and management policies and practices since the first academic days. Presently the national academic physical education policies in the personality shaping domain give less priority to the traditional physical progress goals to rely on the innovative ones that develop the general cultural and professional competences and the job-specific physical education and sport qualities and skills. The innovative specialist training models are largely geared to shape up the individual health management competences and skills for the specialist being fully prepared to efficiently adapt to the job and cope with the professional and social challenges.

In context of the innovative training technologies implementation process, the Physical Education Departments realign their policies to prioritize the individualized (personality focused), sports-prioritizing and job-specific physical education services, with the latter being designed on a more efficient basis within the core part of the academic education Module 1 that is only 72 hours long. The study was designed to develop an efficient new physical education and sport service model based on modern innovative technologies.

Objective of the study was to offer and test benefits of a new physical education and sport service model with innovative education technologies.

Methods and structure of the study. In view of the fact that virtually half of the education material nowadays is expected to be self-learned by the students, new education models include self-reliant learning components with customizable interactive and remote education technologies. Thus Saint Petersburg State University has actively and successfully applied a Blackboard (BB) based physical education and sport competency rating scale in the health groups to motivate the trainees and facilitate their progress [2, p.10]. Saint Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering and Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia offer a few Moodle-based education courses including the traditional theoretical lectures plus a special remote education service toolkit to help the trainees jointly accumulate knowledgebase, communicate, test and rate one another’s progress – and thereby develop the required general cultural and professional competences. Given on Figure 1 hereunder is the physical education and sport service chart for a special health group.

The teacher-assisted trainings under the model are compliant with the standard education curriculum and include both the traditional education tools and modern interactive learning technologies. Thus for the Health Aerobics basics learning process the students were grouped into physical fitness subgroups, each of the subgroup trainings being assisted by a special video lesson to help the trainees correct the execution errors.  The video lessons are formatted and timed as required by the standard timeframe and contents, with the classical program complemented by target subgroup-specific speed-strength and overall endurance building practices [5, p.86].

Figure 1. Academic physical education and sport service chart for special health groups

Results and discussion. To test benefits of the new physical education and sport service model, we split up the student sample into Experimental (EG) and Reference (RG) Groups, with the EG trained under the new model and the RG trained as required by the standard curriculum. Most of the pre-experimental physical fitness tests found no meaningful intergroup differences – whilst the post-experimental tests showed significant progress of the EG versus RG: see Table 1.The self-learning component was designed using the remote Moodle and Blackboard toolkits. Entrants to the course were split up into the diagnose-, physical-fitness- and personal-preferences-specific subgroups, with the subgroup trainings individualized so as to encourage productive cooperation of every trainee and thereby improve the education service quality and efficiency and enhance the students’ motivations for the studies. The Healthy Diet component of the ‘Healthy lifestyle basics and benefits of physical education and sport service for physical and intellectual progress’ course, for instance, offers the trainees to produce own diet and discuss it at a workshop in the subgroup and then consult with the teacher. Creative solutions in the process are facilitated by a variety of tools including the Solution Tree, Brainstorm, Sokrates’ Dialogue, POPS Formula etc. Students are expected to develop good skills to: find the best solution and action plan via analyses of the available options with their pros and cons (e.g. select a set of the diagnose/ pathology specific physical practices); formulate a question, with the question chains designed to encourage analyses and conclusions; and effectively substantiate the own line of thinking in the discussions. This toolkit was found quite effective as it helped the students’ form their own healthy lifestyles and improve the problem solving (in professional and personal domains) skills within their individual capacities.

Table 1. Pre- versus post-experimental physical fitness test rates of the EG and RG

Significant progress of the EG in some of the tests, as we believe, is attributable to the good balance of the assisted and self-reliant learning components. Thus every training was finalized by a set of stretching exercises; and the Health Systems module included a set of the customizable body flexibility, Pilates, stretching and yoga exercises [1, p.68; 4, p.35; 6, p.12].

Conclusion. The new academic physical education and sport service model of our design was found beneficial as verified, among other things, by growth of the students' commitment for the regular physical education lessons reported by the attendance statistics.  

References

1. Grigoriev V.I., Mironova O.V., Tokareva A.V. et al Dykhatelnye gimnastiki na zanyatiyakh fizicheskoy kulturoy so studentami spetsialnoy meditsinskoy gruppy [Breathing exercises at physical education classes with special health group students]. Uchenye zapiski un-ta im. P F. Lesgafta, 2016, no. 2 (132), pp. 67-71.
2. Koval' T.E., Yarchikovskaya L.V., Lukina S.M. Informatsionno-kommunikatsionnye tekhnologii v realizatsii zdorovitelnykh programm v vuze [Information and communication technologies in university health programs implementation]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury,2016, no. 7, pp. 9-11.
3. Lobanov Yu.Ya., Mironova O.V., Tokareva A.V., Kovalenko V.N. Kharakter proyavleniya fizicheskikh kachestv v zavisimosti ot tipologicheskikh osobennostey konstitutsii studentov [Constitution-related display of physical qualities in students]. Uchenye zapiski universiteta im. P.F. Lesgafta, 2018, no. 2 (156), pp. 122-126.
4. Yarchikovskaya L.V., Koval T.E., Lukina S.M., Ustinova O.N. Mesto dykhatelnykh uprazhneniy v kombinirovannykh ozdorovitelnykh programmakh [Role of breathing exercises in combined health programs]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2017, no. 10, pp. 35-37.
5. Kovalenko V. N., Yarkchikovskaya L. V., Kovalenko V. N.,  Mironova O. V. , Tokareva A .V., Ustinova O. N. Healthy lifestyle promotion in academic physical education process. Theory and Practice of Physical Culture, 2018, no. 2, pp. 85-87.

Corresponding author: s.lukina@spbu.ru

Abstract

The study analyzes the modern academic physical education and sport service design options with a special analysis of the available theoretical and practical literature on the subject; with an emphasis on the innovative technologies applicable in the academic physical education and sport service; and offers a new physical education and sport service model that implies a grounded balance of the assisted and self-reliant physical education and sport practices. The model was implemented in Module 1 of the standard academic curriculum. Thus the self-reliant learning component offers special customizable interactive technologies and distant education tools. The assisted learning component for the special group offers a set of study topics to master modern physical conditioning methods and different health systems with the service customization/ individualization toolkit. Benefits of the new physical education and sport service model were proved by an educational experiment that showed by the EG versus RG progress in the academic attendance, physical fitness and managerial skills, with the students found to develop good problem-solving skills in the personality and vocational domains and largely opt for healthy lifestyles.