Improving students’ tactical performance in physical competitions: a mobile technology-based peer-assessment approach in flipped classrooms

Conventional physical education generally puts emphasis on knowledge delivery and skill demonstration in class. In such a teaching mode, the teacher might not have sufficient time to provide feedback to individual students. Flipped learning shifts the lectures for delivering course content to pre-class time, increasing opportunities for teacher-student interactions in class. Therefore, students have more chances to interact with teachers. On the other hand, scholars have pointed out the importance of incorporating effective learning strategies into flipped classrooms to engage students in critical thinking and reflection. Therefore, a peer assessment-based flipped learning (MPA-FL) approach to improving students’ tactical performance in physical education was proposed. A quasi-experiment was conducted in a university basketball course in Taiwan. Two classes of university students were recruited as participants in the flipped classroom using mobile technology. One class with 33 students adopted the MPA-FL approach, while the other with 27 students adopted the conventional flipped learning (C-FL) approach. The results showed that students using the MPA-FL approach significantly outperformed those using the C-FL approach in terms of basketball tactical performance. On the contrary, there were no significant differences between the two groups’ critical thinking tendencies or reflective thinking.