Effects of an adapted physical education course on attitudes toward sport of omani individuals with disabilities

Abstract

The adapted physical education (APA) is a set of sports activities, programs, and exercises that are adjusted to be compatible with individuals with special needs. This research explored the effect of an adapted physical education course on attitudes toward the sport of Omani individuals with disabilities. Participants were 25 undergraduate female students from the Department of Physical Education at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Sultanate of Oman. The participants responded to the attitudes toward APA scale before and after studying the APA course. This scale consisted of 30 items distributed into three domains related to course instructor, course topics, and course teaching methods. The results revealed that studying the APA course significantly contributed to modifying the participants' attitudes toward the sport of Omani individuals with disabilities. In other words, these effects were demonstrated by the high effect size of the studying the APA course on modifying the participants’ attitudes. The research recommends converting the course into a compulsory one, upgrading its credit to 3 credit hours, and adding other courses on Paralympic Games to the program plan at Physical Education Department, SQU. The contributions of this research focused on university special education courses. The presence of these courses will actually contribute to modifying college students’ attitudes toward the sport of individuals with disabilities.