Simcha Avugos’s research while affiliated with Orde Wingate Institute for Physical Education and Sports and other places

This chapter summarizes and discusses the research findings from a study investigating how a prestigious and exclusive physical education teacher education (PETE) program can prepare outstanding physical education students for their role as educational and social leaders. Twenty-nine pre-service student teachers responded to a questionnaire and were interviewed by phone. The participants were asked about their reasons for choosing teacher education studies, the overall contribution of the program to the learners and their teaching skills, and aspects of the program that needed improvement. The findings showed participants appreciated the unique and enriched curriculum, the small, high-quality learning group, and the personal support of the staff. They also felt competent with their teaching abilities. However, the program did not meet their expectations about achieving effective learning of sports education or growing as athletes. These results emphasize the importance of policymakers taking into account the perspectives of students when designing and running specialized programs intended to attract the best and brightest into teaching.

Introduction This study examined the impact of co-teaching on students and lecturers, assessing its benefits and drawbacks, and suggesting ways to enhance collaborative learning. Methods Fifty undergraduate student teachers participated in two sports sciences seminar courses jointly taught by two lecturers. Data was collected via student reflections; course evaluation feedback; word clouds; and teacher reflections. Thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. Results The findings indicate that the short intensive seminar course resulted in three parallel processes: emotional , students transitioning from negative feelings of chaos, frustration, and a sense of incompetence to positive feelings of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment; social , students learning to listen, request assistance, support, encourage, and collaborate; and cognitive , students learning to ask fruitful questions, plan experiments, summarize, and present. Nevertheless, the time and effort demands involved in the planning and management of such courses may constitute a significant barrier to the future implementation of this teaching method. In terms of course outcomes, no indications of higher quality were seen compared to traditional instruction. Discussion Drawing on the symbolic interactionism theory, the study advocates for preparing students for inclusive and collaborative learning environments to improve academic engagement and success.

Even after decades of research, it is largely unclear how the various factors that cause the home advantage act and interact with one another. This paper provides an updated narrative review of the home advantage in sports, with a particular interest in the impact of refereeing. We used multiple sources for data collection and limited our search to peer-reviewed journals. Detailed information was extracted and documented from each of the retrieved articles. Bibliometric data were also calculated and assessed to evaluate the evolution of research in this field. The findings of this review show that home advantage is elevated in certain type of sports and due to properties of the crowd. In particular, the social pressure of the home crowds has direct and indirect effects on both home advantage and referee bias. Studies on games played in empty stadiums provided significant evidence for a reduced referee bias, and a decline in athlete-related variables. Several potential directions for future research emerged from this review. More research on the home advantage in women's sports, in individual sports, and at lower levels of play is warranted. These efforts will contribute to further extend our understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

Previous research has reported that the gambler’s fallacy could be detected in goalkeepers’ behavior during penalty shootouts. Following repeated kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers were more likely to dive in the opposite direction on the next kick. We employ here a unique data collection approach and accurately measure the exact location of each ball when crossing the goal plane. This allows us to analyze how different definitions of the goal center width affect the results, and we show that this width indeed affects whether a gambler’s fallacy in goalkeepers’ diving behavior exists. We further augment the data with additional kicks from top international competitions and analyze the extended dataset. We also question whether previous treatments of kicking sequences adequately represent what goalkeepers consider as a run of consecutive kicks to the same side. A different representation of kicking sequences is provided and applied to the data. Overall, we find some evidence for the gambler’s fallacy after sequences of two or three kicks to the same side.

There is plenty of research on penalty kicking in men's soccer, with a focus on either the goalkeeper or the penalty taker. Yet women's soccer and their playing behaviour are under-represented in research. The current study was designed to examine gender differences in the choice patterns of expert kickers and goalkeepers during penalty shooting in relation to the previously documented right-oriented bias. Using videos of penalties from shootouts at the highest level of men's and women's international soccer, we recorded the goalkeeper's dive direction and accurately measured the location of the ball as it crossed the goal line. We created a map of all kicks and their outcomes (goal, no goal, off-target). Our mapping procedure allowed us to use alternative definitions for the goal centre width and to extract the corresponding kick distribution between right, centre and left. In addition to analysing the potential right-oriented bias in women goalies’ behaviour, we also analysed the joint distribution of kickers’ and goalkeepers’ choices for each score situation (behind, tied, or ahead). Our findings indicate that the goalkeepers’ general tendency was to dive more often to the right, while the kickers’ tendency was to shoot to the right of the goalies. Moreover, this latter tendency of kicking to the goalies’ right was found to be stronger among the female kickers. Finally, our analysis refutes the claim that goalkeepers exhibit a detrimental right-oriented bias, with this conclusion being even stronger among female goalies.

This study was designed to explore coaches' half-time speeches and whether players perceive these speeches as having an impact on their performance later in the game. A mixed-methods convergent design was used. Participants were nine male basketball players aged 19-34 (M = 27, SD = 4.76) from a team playing in the Israeli Basketball Premier League, as well as their head coach (aged 41) and two assistant coaches (aged 51 and 34). Data were collected on the coach's speeches at half-time in games during the regular season. In addition, face-to-face semi-structured interviews with the players and the two assistant coaches were conducted at midseason. The average speech duration was approximately 3 min, and messages were delivered at an average pace of one theme every 13 s. The most frequent theme was psychological , with more negative themes delivered compared to positive ones. Psychological themes appeared 50% more than informational. We discuss the differences in the features of the talks between games in which the team was trailing at half-time, and games in which they reached half-time with a leading score. A surprising gap exists between the participants' perception regarding the contribution of the half-time speech to players' performance, and the actual score at the end of the game.

Most studies on sport officials ignore the variance of the data in terms of individual differences. Here we highlight the need to focus on these differences in refereeing as the main point and goal of the current review. We argue that the study of individual differences is important for referee selection, development and performance evaluation. We present the available research on differences related to referee communication styles, types of interactions, and game management. We regard expertise and experience level as a key contributor to individual differences. Given the gap in research around the in-group variance, we discuss new directions for research and further recommendations for the field. We suggest that the areas in which more research and practice will inform our selection, training, and evaluation processes are communication and personal communication style, while having more flexibility in applying different refereeing styles to facilitate performance in different contexts.

The belief in momentum and the hot hand has often been attributed to misperception and biased judgment. Here we review the major theoretical and empirical advances in the investigation of the success breeds success processes, and demonstrate that the term momentum has been uncritically applied in a wide range of domains to denote various manifestations of streakiness. In the first part of the paper we review three lines of research regarding the influence of success on (a) the performer's psychological state, (b) the performer's and observer's behavior and (c) the subsequent success. We highlight the fact that research on momentum has rather overlooked several essential theories. Thus, in the second part, we integrate momentum-based behaviors and beliefs with the relevant biological and physiological literature. We conclude that in human competitions, like in nature, winners experience psychophysiological responses to success, and project their recent victory onto their surroundings by demonstrating aggressiveness, dominance and determination. The result is that both performers and observers are evolutionarily wired to react to success in competitive situations. Consequently, the term psychophysiological momentum is fitting in the context of sports competitions. ARTICLE HISTORY

Judgment and decision making in sporting officials is a challenging task that involves the use of context. Although process models of decision making describe decision contexts, none of the existing models explains when sports officials use rule-driven decision making, or game management. The basic idea of our work is that referees use a subjective threshold to apply game management, which may explain this decision behavior. We propose a new dynamic threshold model that is based on concepts derived from Decision Field Theory. The model includes two thresholds of game management (high/low) and two contact situations (foul/no foul) as approaching one of these thresholds. Using the example of soccer refereeing, we argue that if the game hits a subjective threshold of aggressive play, then the referee shifts from applying the rules to managing the game. This new approach changes the scientific discussion from one focused on what referees should decide in one situation or the other, to a dynamic model that explains the basic psychological mechanism underlying the referee’s change in behavior during the game, both at the intra-individual as well as inter-individual level.