TGfU Articles

This section provides a review of academic articles in TGfU. A report is presented that aims to summaries the research, highlighting the contribution the research has made to the body of TGfU literature. 

Teachers’ use of teaching games for understanding in central Spain

García-López, L.M., Gutiérrez, D., Sánchez-Mora, D., & Harvey, S. (2019). Teachers’ use of teaching games for understanding in central Spain. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2019.1628931 

The research of game-centered approaches (GCAs) has grown in recent years, nonetheless, it is still unclear how much of GCAs features are applied in Physical Education (PE). García López, Gutiérrez, Sánchez-Mora and Harvey (2019) in their article “Teachers’ use of teaching games for understanding in central Spain”, analysed which TGfU’s elements have been added to lessons by teachers in PE. Participants were 199 teachers (129 teachers belonged to Primary School and 70 teachers belonged to Secondary School) from a central region of Spain. Data were collected using an ad hoc questionnaire.

Their results are based on three research questions:
  1. Which main elements of TGfU do central Spanish PE teachers think have been added to their practice? It is perceived that of the 6 features of the TGfU, 5 are used (a. Games as a pedagogical method, b. Game modification, c. Questioning, d. Organization of lesson using tactical complexity, and e. Use of thematic approach to fames teaching).
  2. Which features make Central Spanish PE teachers realize that they are teaching games through TGfU? The features c. (questioning) and d. (organization of lesson using tactical complexity) are the ones that most strongly predict the perception of the use of the model.
  3. Have secondary school and primary school PE teachers in Central Spain included the main elements of TGfU into their games teaching practice in the same way? Secondary school teachers perceive that they incorporated the key features of TGfU more than primary school teachers.

The results of this study seem to show that despite teachers do not implement the “full version” of TGfU, they perceive the importance of most of its features, and therefore, implement the model in PE. Nevertheless, despite the importance of this finding, the quality of the implementation is not clarified, as well as the reason for its use. Furthermore, there seems to be an unequal use in the educational stages in Spain. These results open some future lines of research focused on finding out the causes of inequality between educational stages and checking the quality of the implementation of the TGfU. Finally, it seems necessary to boost the application of the full version of TGfU in PE. 
​Review completed by Yessica Segovia, PhD Student, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.