The systematic observation of teacher behaviour in physical education : the design of an instrument

Compared with research in classrooms, the teaching of physical education has not proved to be a popular research topic. The reasons for this apparent neglect can be seen in the lack of suitable research instruments to describe the teaching of physical education and the complex technical problems of recording lessons which take place out of doors in large, open spaces. This study set out to design an instrument which could be used to describe the teaching of physical education in any setting (indoors and outdoors). The investigation consisted of three studies. The first was the production of an instrument (BOS 1) with 42 categories which recorded every item of teacher behaviour in a lesson. The system was difficult to learn, required a great deal of time to analyse and was found to be unsuitable for live coding....cont'd