Investigating the relationship between learning modality and problem solving skills of physical education and sports students

This investigation is made for, to identify the learning modality and problem solving skills of physical education and sports students, to find the effects of their personal characteristics on learning modalities and problem solving skills, and to find a relationship between learning modalities and problem solving skills. Investigation?s specimen consists from 537 junior and 545 senior students, (total number of 1082) randomly chosen from Interior Anatolia Region?s universities Physical Education and Sports faculties? Physical Education and Sports, Sports Management and Trainer departments. For data collection in the investigation; ?BIG 16 Learning Modality Inventory?, developed by Simsek (2002), was used for identifying the students? learning modalities, ?Problem Solving Inventory?, developed by Heppner and Petersen (1982) and translated into Turkish by Sahin, Sahin and Heppner (1993), was used for identifying the students? problem solving skills and finally ?Personal Information Form?, developed by the investigator, was used to identify the students? personal characteristics. To investigate the meaningful correlation of students? learning modalities and their personal characteristics, chi square method was used. To investigate the correlation between total points and lower dimensions of students? problem solving skills? mean scores and their personal characteristics, independent group t test was used in double groups, and one way variant analysis (ANOVA) was used if there was two or more groups. To find the meaningful correlation?s source, Tukey?s HSD and LSD tests were used if the variants are equal, and Tamhane?s T2 test was used if they are not equal. The correlation between learning modality base scores and problem solving skills was investigated with Pearson Moments Multiple Correlation Coefficient. By the investigation?s results; 1. More than half of the students (54,6%) were identified as visual, 25,1% of them were identified as kinesthetic, 20,2% were identified as auditory. vi 2. Students? learning modalities have meaningful correlation with how they plan their studying times, but it does not have meaningful correlation with their sex, age, department, grade, their high school type, their high school?s field type, branch or the 4th grade students? academic achievements. 3. Students? problem solving skills and problem solving approaches were generally identified at middle level. 4. Students? problem solving skills? lower dimensions have meaningful correlations as; evaluating approach lower dimension was correlated with class variables; impatient approach, thinking approach, self trust approach lower dimensions mean scores and problem solving skills total mean scores were correlated with how they plan their studying times; self trust approach and planned approach lower dimension mean scores were correlated with 4th grade students academic achievements; avoiding approach lower dimension mean scores and problem solving skill total mean scores were correlated with learning modalities. Students? problem solving skills total scores and lower dimensions? mean scores were not meaningfully correlated with their sex, age, department, their high school type, their high school?s field type or branch. 5. Kinesthetic, auditory and visual modalities? base scores and thinking approach, evaluating approach, self trust approach, planned approach lower dimension scores and problem solving total scores have negative meaningful correlation between each other. Also, visual learning modality and avoiding approach lower dimension has negative meaningful correlation between each other.