Investigating students’ understanding and cultural competence towards traditional sporting games using ANOVA statistic in higher education: A case study.

Abstract

Traditional sporting games are a part of cultural heritage that needs to be constantly preserved. Various efforts are made for the preservation of traditional sporting games, one of which is by incorporating them into the educational curriculum. The involvement of traditional sporting games in the educational curriculum needs to be assessed for its effectiveness so that it can be used as an evaluation tool to enhance the quality of teaching and achieve the set learning objectives. This study aims to test the effectiveness of traditional sport education at the undergraduate level in the Department of Sport Education at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta. The study focused on two variables: students' level of understanding of traditional sports and student's cultural awareness. The results showed that the level of understanding of students from four different cohorts falls into the "good" category, with the 2019 batch scoring 34.28±6.4, the 2020 batch scoring 35.53±6.4, the 2021 batch scoring 34.70±6.7, and the 2022 batch scoring 33.32±7.5. Meanwhile, in terms of cultural awareness, the overall level of cultural awareness among the four different batch is rated as "fair," with the 2019 batch scoring 25.59±9.6, the 2020 batch scoring 28.92±9.3, the 2021 batch scoring 25.39±8.4, and the 2022 batch scoring 24.68±10.4. The ANOVA analysis concluded that there was no significant difference in the average scores among the four groups in this study for the two variables mentioned above (p>0.05), even though the 2022 batch has never taken traditional sports courses, and the 2019 batch has passed three years since they took traditional sports courses. This indicated that there was no significant impact of traditional sports courses on the level of understanding and cultural awareness among students in the department. In conclusion, there is a need for the revitalization of content and teaching strategies so that traditional sports courses can be used to promote a better understanding of traditional sports and cultural awareness among students.