Traditional Educational Model vs. Educational Model of Teaching Games for Understanding for Teaching Long Badminton Service in Female Adolescents: Cross-Sectional Study

Learning is one of the important parts of life. There is not sufficient experimental evidence to support the effectiveness of different educational models. This study endeavored to compare the effect of traditional educational model and teaching games for understanding (TGFU) model on learning the long service skill in female adolescents. For this quasi-experimental, cross-sectional study, 40 adolescent female students without experience of playing badminton were randomly divided into two groups of 20 as the traditional learning model group and TGFU model. Data were collected using the personal information questionnaire and Scott and Fox badminton long service test. The study consisted of pre-testing a set of attempts with 20 repetitions, acquisition stage (exercises in the style of traditional educational model and educational model of TGFU) for 12 sessions of 5 sets with 10 attempts according to the available manuals; the post-test (memorization) stage was one attempt with 20 repetitions. Data were analyzed by Friedman test for the intra-group comparisons and the Mann-Whitney test and the Wilcoxon test for intergroup comparisons at the significance level of 0.05. The results showed no significant difference between various categories of acquisition efforts (P ≥ 0.05); however, the average rank of TGFU training model group was higher than that of the traditional training group. In the post-test comparison (0.75 to 1 point), the TGFU educational model group had a higher mean than the traditional educational model group (P ≤ 0.001). Based on the results obtained, it seems that the TGFU educational model can be proposed as a better educational model to replace the traditional skill-based educational model for training and coaching.