Identifying Essential Content in the Introduction to Adapted Physical Education Class

Overview & Synopsis

Physical education teachers often teach students with disabilities despite feeling ill-prepared to and do so. Most physical education teacher education programs in the US and abroad only include one single course in adapted physical education (APE) which predicts physical educators' lack of preparation to support students with disabilities. Furthermore, instructors of this one APE course (in PETE programs) may not be professionally trained in the area of APE. Thus, it is paramount that the content and instruction provided in this one APE course is optimized, yet limited consensus exists as to what that content should include. The purpose of this study was to determine the most important topics to include in the "Introduction to Adapted Physical Education" class for physical education majors enrolled in teacher training programs. In this research, we conducted a three-phase descriptive/analytic study to obtain consensus regarding the most important adapted physical education topics needed for future physical educators to better support teaching students with disabilities. In phase one, 200 general and adapted physical educators provided their top 10 topics to be taught in this Intro to APE class in one open-ended question. In phase two, four APE "experts" created themes from the 2000 responses occurring in step one. Finally, in phase three, 15 APE "experts" rated the themes from 1 (least) to 5 (most) important. The top-rated topics are included in our results. Future research and implications are discussed.