Sport events at the community level: A pedagogical tool to improve skills for students and teachers

The purpose of this paper is to identify motives that lead students and teachers of sports science to participate voluntarily in the organization of sport events at a community level.

A questionnaire composed of five dimensions, expression of values, concern for the community, interpersonal contacts, vocational guidance and personal growth/development, was given to a sample of students and teachers. Then a confirmatory factorial analysis was applied to the five dimensions and descriptive statistics was used to identify the ranking in terms of the reasons why teachers and students decide to engage in extracurricular activities. The Mann-Whitney U-Test was used to identify significant differences between the two groups.

Teachers and students consider that the main reasons for their involvement are related to expression of values, concern for the community and vocational guidance. Significant differences were found indicating that for students, gaining experience for future jobs is one of their priorities but for the teachers they consider that helping others and contributing to the good of society are the main reasons.

The implications for organizers of community sport events are that different rationale for contributing need to be taken into account.

This study contributes to the pedagogical strategies that can be used to improve the training of the sports science students. It is important to note that the involvement of students and teachers in extracurricular activities can benefit from their integration into the labor market.