A course design approach for teaching beginning archery: a qualitative study

Introduction

The following course design is proposed to provide the student with opportunities to learn techniques and fundamentals of shooting, basic safety considerations, archery equipment selection and care. This course is designed to help each student attain, through practice, skill in the basic fundamentals of archery and to create and promote interest in archery. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design an archery course at the beginning level.

Methods

A needs assessment procedure was conducted at the beginning of the study. The clients, audiences, and target population were described and a coordinator was appointed for the project. Basically, the following data gathering procedures were applied; (1) Interview: Interviews were made with instructors in different universities, archery coaches in different archery clubs, archers in different skill levels to organize the course content, (2) Observation: Observations were made during archery competition again for the purpose of content organization, and (3) Literature Review: The literature related with archery was reviewed before starting the data gathering process. The particapants of the study were composed of 12 students who were taking the beginning level archery course (age x = 21  2.35), three instructors who were teaching beginning level archery course in their institutions from three different universities (age x = 29  3.45), and three archery coaches or experts who were working for both their sports clubs and Turkish National Archery teams (age x = 45 ± 6.23).

Results

All of the students who were taking Archery course expressed that they had chosen this course because of their interest in archery. All of the experts stated that their first purpose in teaching archery to beginners was to train archers for national archery teams. With the aim of this purpose, they intended to improve their sportsmen’s motor abilities. Experts advised to teach archery techniques in the order of stance position, holding, drawing, full draw, and aiming without nocking the arrow on the bow as being an example of inductive approach. One of the three experts who used deductive approach advised to teach first stance position. Then he claimed that a coach should explain how to nock the arrow on the bow and all of the following skills should be taught by performing shots from short distances. The basic difference between the inductive and deductive approaches in teaching basic archery skills is that the inductive approach starts shooting after teaching all stable steps whereas deductive approach starts shooting after the archer is taught the basic skills while he/she is shooting. Like two of the experts who defended inductive approaches, instructors aimed to teach draw, full draw, and aiming positions as third, fourth, and fifth steps respectively. All of the observed elite archers performed the same sequence of shooting techniques with small inter-individual differences.

Discussion / Conclusions

The course has been proposed on the basis of a) implications of the needs assessment, b) literature review on teaching psychomotor abilities and especially archery techniques, and c) researcher’s insight. The beginning archery course has been designed under the following subheadings; (1) General Objectives of the Course, (2) Specific Learning Outcomes, (3) Activities, Materials, and Method, (4) Student Evaluation, and (5) Course Evaluation.

References

[1]. Gibbon, F. T. and Morris, L. L. (1978). How to design a program evaluation. Beverly Hills. Sage.
[2]. Mosston, M., Asworth, S. (1192). Teaching Physical Education. Fourth Edition, McMillan College Publishing Company. Pp. 31 - 64.
[3]. Schmidt, R.A. (1982). Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis. Human Kinetics Press.