There are three different potential final assessments for this module.  Your teacher may choose to ask you to do one, two, or all three of the assessments.

The final assessment is a sample Paper 3.  Fill in each of the short-answer boxes to answer each of the questions.  

Time for this assessment - five minutes reading time, followed by one hour to complete your responses to the questions.

A mock paper

Please read the stimulus piece below.  When answering the questions, be sure to refer to the details in the study.

Holt et al (2008) carried out a case study to investigate whether young people learn life skills through their involvement in high school sports.  Educators, parents, and students tend to believe that sports help to promote teamwork, foster strong character, and teach goal setting.  However, there are some that argue that students that have these skills tend to be more successful in sports and therefore end up on the team.  Others argue that the coach plays an active role in teaching and developing these skills.  This study had the goal of learning from the athletes what they felt they learned from being a member of their team.

The study took place at a Canadian high school with a good reputation for athletics and a coach who was regarded as an effective youth leader.  The school was large and had a diverse student population.  The researchers obtained consent from the school and the coach of the boys’ soccer (football) team.  They then asked for volunteers from the team to take part in the study.  12 boys with a mean age of 17.1 years, agreed to take part in the study. On average, the boys had 11.3 years of playing experience.

The coach was a 31-year‐old male. He was a full‐time teacher at the school and had played soccer at the highest amateur level.

There were two researchers. The male researcher had been a university soccer player and coach. He attended training sessions, occasionally helped the coach to organize drills, and generally helped out without specifically coaching the team. The female researcher also attended training sessions and games, but she had fewer direct interactions with the student‐athletes. She took notes about the interactions among team members and later conducted semi-structured interviews with the students. The lead researcher was more of a participant‐observer whereas the co-researcher was more of a non‐participant observer.

The researchers attended 10 practices and 10 games during the season – resulting in 60 hours of direct observation.  In addition, formal interviews were carried out at the end of the season. The student-athletes were asked a series of questions about the life skills they learned through their involvement on the team. The interviews were audio‐recorded.

The researchers observed that the coach did not engage in any direct teaching about goal setting, respect, teamwork, or leadership. Instead, the coach said that is main focus was “to have the players appreciate that they are part of a tradition of excellence and that they do their best to represent that tradition.” The coach’s philosophy played out in soccer by his telling student-athletes that, although they could not change the situation (e.g., the referee’s call), they could change their attitude in that situation.

From the interviews, none of the student‐athletes reported that they learned goal-setting directly from playing on the soccer team. Rather, it seemed that the coach created a structure for youth to set goals and reach for them, rather than specifically teaching these qualities.

Although the students reported that they had learned to respect other athletes and teams, the researchers did not find evidence to show that respect transferred out of the immediate soccer context.

Teamwork and leadership were the only concepts that student‐athletes thought transferred to other areas of their lives. However, rather than the coach directly teaching the student‐athletes about teamwork /leadership, they seemed to be producers of their own experiences.