Essentials for Sport and Exercise Science

Course Content:

The module provides an essential introduction to the skills required for undergraduate
study and scientific research. The key and transferable skills for effective study are
provided so that all students, irrespective of previous qualifications can approach all
future modules adequately equipped to undertake learning and assessments.

The module has been further designed to allow the student to understand the principles
of qualitative and quantitative experimental research and elementary data analysis.

Autumn Semester content summary:

Topics covered may include:
? Generic Study Skills: Including time management and planning; independent
study; referencing; feedback and how to use it; exam preparation; key and
transferable skills; employability skills; personal development portfolio

Spring Semester content summary:
? Experiment Design and Analysis:
? The historical foundation of sport research: renaissance scholars,
empiricism, logic and determinism Introduction to Research
methodologies
? Ethics morals and misconduct in research and scholarship -
considerations for research on human participants - Informed consent,
Par-Q & CRB, cheating and plagiarism. Hypothesis setting and defining
variables
? Proposal of a small quantitative or qualitative research project: aim and
rationale (providing a context for your research), research question or
theory, experimental methodology, hypothesis, Independent and
Dependant variables, parametric and non-parametric tests, seeking
relationships or differences, statistical inference ? sample and
populations, statistical significance, confidence intervals. proposed
testing procedures, Health and Safety, legal and ethical issues
? Descriptive statistics - summarising data, measures of location and
dispersion. The normal distribution.
? Tests of correlation; rank correlation; regression analysis; bivariate
analysis.
? Tests of difference ? one sample tests; two sample tests (independent
and related design), One-way ANOVA and Factorial Analysis of Variance,
Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Analysis of Covariance, Within
subject and mixed design, repeated measures and mixed design ANOVA.

Teaching: Lectures, seminars, workshops and personal tutorials

Assessment:
STUDY OPTION 1:
? Practical: Research proposal presentation (20%)
? Coursework: PDP/Research coursework (80%)
STUDY OPTION 2:
? Personal development portfolio (comprises logbook, essay and CV).
STUDY OPTION 3:
? SPSS data analysis

Study Option 1 = Whole Year
Study Option 2 = Autumn
Study Option 3 = Spring/summer