Facilitating the process of learning social skills through humanistic physical education

An experiment to assess the effects of the responsibility model on students’ social skills’ development was conducted in Malaysia. Instruction using specific teaching strategies which served as the intervention program and a pretest-posttest control group designed was utilized for this study. One hundred and forty six students aged thirteen years old were involved in this study. The students were divided into four different classes. The ssteaching of humanistic physical education uses the responsibility model developed by Hellison and adapted to Malaysian physical education curriculum. It was hypothesized that the responsibility model would improve students’ social skills and would assists students responding to sports and non-sports related dilemmas. The hypothesis of the study received significant support. Students in the experimental group improved significantly after exposure to the responsibility model. The implication of this study showed that the responsibility model does influence students’ social skill development. Therefore, specific teaching strategies should be use in teaching physical education so that the aim of producing students whom are able to choose right from wrong and good from bad are no longer taken for granted.