Abstract:

Feedback forms to Youth Sport Teacher/Coaches from their students will gather input from these students in School Sports Programs about their experiences, goals, and areas where they feel improvement is needed. Using the technology, students will give weekly feedback to coaches regarding their perceptions of coach: Professionalism, Knowledge, Communication, Patience, and Effectiveness. The feedback, will allow coaches to provide more personalized and targeted feedback to the athletes that addresses the specific needs, comments, and learning preferences, expressed by each athlete. The research hypothesis is that young athletes will have a meaningful experience in youth sport if effective channels of communication are present and being used. The results are measured using the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ). The GEQ has been used to successfully measure cohesiveness in youth sports teams in the categories of Individual attraction to the group in tasks and social components, and in terms of group integration towards task and social goals. The presenter will show results from using this technology with actual students, and present to those in attendance live and via the recorded session.

The type of technology that has been used by the researcher is the hosted software platform called JotForm. One reason for using JotForm is that Jotform offers a free plan with basic features that teacher/coaches could modify and build on in the future [after research study is completed]. Thus, technology budgets would not be a limiting factor for follow up work by the teachers using this software. Coaches will gather input from athletes about the athletes experiences, goals, and concerns using JotForm's customizable templates and the drag-and-drop form builder. Athlete feedback and responses is gathered immediately following practices via mobile device or via computer tablet on the day of the last practice of the week. Jotform data collected from the online data entry will be collected in real time into Google Sheets on a password protected site that only the teacher/coach and researcher will have access to. For the teacher/coach, the provides an organized data interface and the data capturing mechanism that can be used to monitor the trends in feedback from athletes, including a demonstration of how to conduct a correlational analysis of statistically significant related variables using scatter plots in google sheets as well. Student Evaluated Professionalism, Knowledge, Communication, Patience, and Effectiveness; and Team and Individual athlete variables such as:
1) team wins and losses,
2) individual athlete satisfaction with the program, or
3) with coach’s self evaluation in the same category on the research instrument at particular points throughout the season will also be graphically expressed using correlational analysis.

These free feedback forms and surveys provide teacher/coaches with valuable insights into athletes' experiences, goals, and areas of concern on a regular basis, helping the coaches to make informed decisions that will enhance the overall training and performance of the coach, and in turn, effect the performance of the team, without incurring any cost.

Keywords:

Technology, Education, Feedback, Database, Cohesion, Environment, Secure, Teacher, Enhancement, Quality, Teaching.