Descriptive survey of grant funded physical education teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions in adapted physical education

摘要

This study examined physical education teachers' perceptions of their knowledge, skills, and dispositions, who received federal funding and training from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in Adapted Physical Education (APE). The OSEP offers grant opportunities to institutions of higher education, non-profits, and other educational agencies grant opportunity to develop highly qualified adapted physical education teachers.;Survey research methods (Dillman, Smyth & Christian, 2014) were employed to collect information from participants. A 52-item questionnaire was developed along with established validity and reliability of the instrument. The survey was sent out to 272 former OSEP participants from seven institutes of higher education (IHE). A response rate of 55.76% was noted for this survey. Descriptive results from participant mean scores for perceived knowledge showed that participants felt they were well prepared to very well prepared to teach students with disabilities. Mean scores for perceived skills was found to be skillful to very skillful to work with students with disabilities. Mean scores for perceived dispositions score was shown that working with students with disabilities was important to very important. A general linear model ANOVA revealed interaction effects for gender identity and ethnic identity for knowledge and skills. Finally, OSEP personnel preparation grant participant's perception of their knowledge, skills, and dispositions in APE suggest that participation in an OSEP funded program helped improve physical education teachers for teaching students with disabilities.