An Examination of Effective Teaching Methods Within

             Sports Science students are largely motivated by active learning methods due to their own personal interests in sports, which are of course, active. The approach of active learning' is hard to define in one simple sentence because it covers such a wide range of areas, however, Modell and Michael, (Promoting Active Learning in Life Science Classrooms, P.8), defined active learning as, "We define an active learning environment as one in which students individually are encouraged to engage in the process of building their own mental models from the information they are acquiring. In addition, as part of the active learning process, the student should constantly test the validity of the model being constructed-. .
             Whether or not the attention spans of sports scientists are shorter than the average student is up for debate, and there are no studies that I am aware of that give an argument either for or against. What is clear, however, is that many sports science students become disinterested very quickly if being lectured to, or if there is little or no active learning taking place. .
             Incorporating Practical Work Into Sports Science.
             Practical work should take up a reasonable amount of teaching time in the Sports Science lesson. This is because practical classes help to demonstrate the theory and may provide a deeper understanding of the theory. How you balance the theory with the practical classes depends on what is being taught. If the subject matter is hard to digest for many of the students then you may need to take more time demonstrating the theory in a practical manner. .
             What has become clear to me, however, is that there needs to be an integration of theory and practice in the same lesson. Completely separating the theory from the practice could be disastrous. If you lecture about the theory in the first class and then perform the practical in the second class without any explanation of the theory, the students could become very confused and the lesson would be of little value as the students may not know what they are doing or why.