Ph.D., associate professor of N.V. Masyagina
Moscow sports training center of Moscow Sports Committee

Keywords:  professional competences, assessment of skills and abilities, skills and abilities for specific sports, pupils’ preferences in specific sports, problems of Competence Training Centre.

Introduction. Competences are the knowledge, skills and abilities used by specialists in the course of their professional practice to work efficiently. Thanks to the unity of these three components specialist’s competences can be considered as a system made of three components. The essence of these components being present all together is that their combined action results in such an activity of a specialist, which substantially exceeds the original value of the three components. In other words, these three properties underlie the third property, which is not the total of the three original ones but a new formation superior in professionalism to all the original ones. This fact should be taken into account and implemented in the specialist training. This is the main difficulty of training, especially in the sphere of physical culture and sport. Let us consider why it is so difficult to implement the new system in the field of physical culture and sport.

Firstly, it is not only desirable, like in other professions, but absolutely necessary for a specialist in physical culture and sport to have skills, since otherwise he cannot teach motor actions which is the essence of his profession. Specialists understand this very well and practically count the skills and abilities in their routine activities. It is easy to conclude that if they count the skills and abilities they use in their work, it means that they seek to have as many skills as possible. As for initial skills, they acquire them during their university studies. And here our specialist acquires the second quality - the ability to acquire desired competences on his own.

It's not surprising for anyone that former athletes are admitted to universities of physical culture and sport. Sports career is associated with available youth properties in man such as courage, recklessness, fortitude, ability to devote all energies in the shortest period of time; when lifting unbearable weight or running a distance, the young man reaches the finish line on the limit of his capacities, without thinking about the consequences, and many more – all these are the signs of human youth. As athletes say, our profession has a short term. Being done as an athlete, a specialist enters a university of physical culture and sport: it is then, at the very beginning of training, given his previous sports activity, being young enough to learn, he can acquire as many skills as possible, required for a specialist in this area - the peculiarities of this process seem relevant to us.

The purpose of the research was to assess professional competences of a specialist in physical culture and sport in his practice with the view of designing a future specialist training system.

Materials and methods. We conducted the first research to assess the skills of specialists in physical culture and sport. With this purpose in mind, 30 subjects were chosen - 15 physical education teachers, working in Moscow secondary schools and 15 coaches of Moscow Youth Sports Schools. Each subject was asked to count the number of skills they use at work. These skills and their characteristics in this study were defined by the subjects themselves. Under the terms of the experiment the subjects were able to communicate with each other in order to determine the objects of the research together or on their own.

Results and discussion. The experimental results for teachers and coaches are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Number of skills of specialists in physical culture and sport

           Note first of all that the skill range in both groups is the same. For teachers this range is from 3 to 12 skills, which are distributed fairly equally: 2-3 subjects per each skill. The range for coaches is from 4 to 13 skills, which are distributed from 1 to 5 coaches per each skill. All this suggests that both the number of practical skills and the number of subjects having each of these skills are close to each other. This is especially important to know when teaching such subjects, since it means that they can be trained in the same group. This is particularly important when training at the Centre, as there are only a few groups here - less than in the university. Then attention should be drawn to the fact that coaches, although only a little, but still have more skills than teachers. Therefore, if it is possible to divide the common group into sub-groups, coaches and teachers need to be trained separately. Tabular data also indicate that about half of both teachers and coaches have fewer skills, and the other half - a larger number of skills. Obviously, there is also a dependence on the concrete field work, which should be evaluated in the course of learning.

The data on the distribution of skills of our subjects are very similar to skill charts. Thus, the maximum number of subjects with the same number of skills is the same for teachers and coaches and is equal to 5. The number of skills in both groups is very close to each other. Thus, for teachers the maximum number of skills they have is 11 and for coaches - 15. All of this suggests that the skills of our subjects are in a certain range, which is very close for coaches and teachers. Just as in the case of skills, it indicates that both groups can be trained together. Moreover, coaches have more skills than teachers.

Note that the detected number of skills being greater in coaches rather than teachers is not an absolutely proven fact. Furthermore, our research has shown that in some cases the situation can be opposite: teachers should have more skills. This is particularly evident when it comes to dealing with sports. The point is that teachers who work with pupils need to display skills in many sports, as the pupils have not yet decided what sport to choose and are trying many sports. Thus, we conducted a research with regard to different sports with pupils in 2000 and 2007. Teaching different sports, which requires from teachers a lot of specific knowledge and skills, leads to the fact that pupils estimate their sports activity in different sports as more or less close to their own abilities and interests. In this regard, their attitude to various sports is formed as a vested interest in physical training. This results in the diversity of interests that must be taken into account, when involving pupils in sport. Now one is to consider the fact of change of sports, which greatly affects children’s interests (Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4).

In 2000, we conducted a study with fifth-formers (total number of subjects - 50 girls and 50 boys) with regard to different sports. 25 most popular sports were chosen by the frequency of their appearance in television broadcasts. The respondents were asked to indicate one sport they like. Fig.1 shows that football was most popular among the boys: approximately one third of the respondents mentioned it. Hockey and basketball were quite popular too.

The girls (Fig. 2) noted figure skating (over a third of the respondents), track and field athletics and gymnastics. Specialists needed large amounts of knowledge and skills to work with pupils in these sports. So we have made the first conclusion that the number of professional competences in our profession is directly dependent on the number of sports, in which the specialist is involved.

Football would seem preferable for boys and figure skating – for girls. Such a statement, if it was constant, would resolve a number of practical problems: it would be possible to predict the number of groups involved in specific sports, design sports facilities for these sports, to train the due number of specialists, etc. However, practice has shown that the aggregation of respondents' opinions varies over time, conditioning the second conclusion: more frequent changes in the society require more competences from our specialist.

Fig.1. Sports preferences of fifth-formers (boys) in 2000

 In order to confirm this fact, we conducted a similar research in 2007. We also asked the respondents to consider 25 most popular sports at that time, we had chosen by the frequency of references on television. In 2007, in our society sports preferences changed significantly – and the children’s preferences changed too. Thus, 50 5^th-formers (boys) noted as preferable the following sports: martial arts, hockey, and basketball (Fig. 3). Changes in the opinion of children regarding sports preferences are understudied.

We believe, there are deep social reasons, which are far from sports, for the appearance of new sports and sports preferences. Here we would like to note only that the existence of this problem lasts in time and therefore is directly related with the formation of competences.

Fig. 2. Sports preferences of fifth-formers (girls) in 2000

Fig. 3. Sports preferences of fifth-formers (boys) in 2007

As seen from Figure 3, about half of the respondents (48%) prefer martial arts. The next most important sports for boys are hockey (22%) and basketball (16%). New sports such as martial arts and motor racing, which had not been mentioned before, were named among the respondents’ preferences. It is also interesting that in 2000 the third of the respondents considered football as the most important sport, but in 2007 almost half of the respondents preferred martial arts. This suggests that the assessment of sports by society in general and children in particular is changing rapidly and children tend to currently most popular sports.

A similar situation is observed in the assessment of the opinions of girls – fifth-formers in 2007 (Fig. 4). The girls chose fitness as the most important sport for them (58%). Figure skating (16%) and tennis (14%) took the second and the third places respectively. Like in the case of the boys, the importance of the first sport has increased significantly. In this case, specialists in physical culture need much more competences too. It is easy to assume that in other periods of time the preferences of children can be different in the social practice, so our specialists will need even more competences. So, more frequent changes in respondents’ opinions will require more competences from the specialists.

Fig. 4. Sports preferences of fifth-formers (girls) in 2007

In general, sports can indicate the following:

- the popularity of certain sports varies considerably from year to year;

- every sport marked as popular at a certain time attracts the growing number of pupils;

- based on television broadcasts and media information, we can say that pupils’ opinions are aggregated in compliance with advertising of the relevant sport and the level of sports achievements of highly qualified athletes.

Conclusion. A specific aggregation of opinions of young people regarding particular sports is observed in the society. In other words, there is a creatively oriented environment, constantly changing in the society, that promotes achievements of highly qualified athletes and requires the development of appropriate competences of specialists in physical culture and sport. Therefore it is necessary to continuously improve the theoretical and methodological support of the formation and development of new training methods, forms and conditions in the educational process. All this argues for the systematic development of new competences of specialists.

References

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Corresponding author: svnach@ya.ru