Yen-Nan Lin’s research while affiliated with Ling Tung University and other places

To win in sports competitions, in addition to excellent sports skills, coping strategies in the face of various competition situations are also critical for success. Therefore, cultivating students' diverse, creative and flexible tactical application abilities is an important educational goal in sports training. However, in the online component of blended training in sports, conventional instructional approaches are teacher‐centred and hardly ever adopt the consolidated approaches to creative problem solving used in other fields. This results in limited opportunities for students to discover the problems and apply their creative thinking tendencies for problem solving. Hence, the present study proposed applying a consolidated creative problem‐solving approach in the online phase of blended training initiatives in order to cultivate students' higher‐order thinking skills. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, a convenience grouping‐based quasi‐experiment design was adopted. A 10‐week teaching experiment was conducted in a billiards training course. A total of 79 students were recruited in this study; they were divided into one CPS‐BL group with 41 students and one conventional blended learning (C‐BL) group with 38 students. The results showed that the CPS‐BL approach could significantly enhance students' billiards striking strategies, creative thinking tendencies and problem‐solving skills. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic In many sports, like billiards, physical skills are generally not enough; higher‐order thinking skills are also needed to succeed. Blended learning in these sports generally entails teacher‐centred approaches in the online component and practice in the f2f component. This provides students with limited opportunities to develop their creative problem‐solving skills. There are consolidated methods to develop students' strategic skills though creative problem solving, but these are seldom applied in sports. What this paper adds The application of a creative problem‐solving approach to physical education is proposed. An experiment was conducted in a university billiards course to evaluate the impacts of the proposed approach. The approach enhanced students' billiards striking strategies, problem‐solving skills and creative thinking. Implications for practice and/or policy of creative problem‐solving‐based blended learning has great potential for promoting students' problem‐solving skills and creative thinking. Implications for practice and/or policy Creative problem solving‐based blended learning has great potential for promoting students' problem‐solving skills and creative thinking. The findings of this study provide a reference for future endeavours in designing blended physical learning.

In order to stimulate students' active participation and thirst for knowledge, researchers have attempted to integrate flipped learning into courses, which aims to solve the problems in the traditional stereotypical physical skills learning mode (e.g., imitation and repeated practice) as well as to increase peer and teacher-student interaction. However, most of the flipped learning approaches use text for knowledge transfer, and lack guidance for practicing skills. Hence, the present study referred to the educational theory of reflective practice, and proposed the Identification, Communication, Reflection, and Analysis (ICRA) learning strategy. This strategy was applied to badminton skill learning so as to develop a flipped learning approach more suitable for physical skill learning. A total of 35 students were recruited as the experimental group, which adopted the ICRA-based mobile flipped learning (ICRA-MFL) approach, while 39 students in the control group adopted the conventional mobile flipped learning (C-MFL) approach. The findings indicated that the ICRA-MFL approach could significantly enhance students' serve accuracy, serve quality, and self-reflection. Based on students' feedback, it was verified that instructing students to identify the crucial concepts, carry out peer interaction, observe their practice videos, as well as providing the criteria for objective analysis could effectively support students’ self-reflection and enhance their learning performance.

Background: The purpose of this study was to explore the gaze behavior of tennis players with different skill levels when receiving serves through eye movement information. Methods: The skill level was divided into group A (experts, with more than 10 years of playing experience) and group B (novices, with less than 2 years of playing experience). We compared the differences in gaze behavior between groups A and B at the head-shoulder, trunk-hips, arm-hand, leg-foot, racket, ball, and racket-ball contact area seven positions using the Eye-gaze Response Interface Computer Aid (ERICA) device. Data were analyzed using two-way ANOVA. Results: Compared with the novices, the experts have more gaze time in the head–shoulders, rack, and ball when serving forehand (p < 0.01). The experts also have more gaze time on the head–shoulders, trunk–hips, racket, ball, and racket–ball contact area when serving backhand (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Expert athletes have a longer stare time for a specific position, which mainly determines the direction of the ball. Tennis coaches can increase the gaze time for these four positions and improve tennis players’ ability to predict the direction of the ball.

In most performing classes, such as dance or performing arts, students passively follow the scripts or demonstration provided by the teacher, and focus on imitating the acts and practicing repeatedly. Although researchers have begun trying out flipped learning to provide students with opportunities for self‐learning and to increase the time for in‐class collaborative learning and interactions, students’ performing creativity is generally ignored. As a result, the present study proposes a creative problem solving‐based flipped learning (CPS‐based flipped learning) approach to guide students to comprehend the pre‐class materials and to develop their creativity through creative thinking. Moreover an experiment was conducted in a choreography activity of a dance course. A total of 125 university students were recruited and divided into the CPS‐based flipped learning (CPS‐FL) group, the conventional flipped learning (FL) group, and the conventional technology‐based learning (TBL) group for an 18‐week teaching experiment. The results showed that the CPS‐based flipped learning approach could significantly increase students' choreography creativity, dance skills and creative thinking tendency. In addition, the FL group also outperformed the TBL group on choreography creativity and dance skills. No significant differences between the three groups’ collaboration tendency could be found. Lastly, from the students' feedback, it was learned that the CPS‐based flipped learning approach was conducive to stimulating students' inspiration for creation, enhancing their ability to appreciate dance programs and improving their implementation and practice abilities. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic In traditional performing classes, students generally passively follow the examples of demonstration provided by the teacher and focus on repetitive practice. Flipped learning enables students to have more opportunities to practice and interact with peers and the teacher in the class. In flipped learning, proper learning design could be beneficial to increasing students' creativity. What this paper adds A creative problem solving‐based flipped learning approach is proposed. An experiment was conducted in a university dance course to evaluate the impacts of the proposed approach. In addition to performing skills, the proposed approach enhanced the students' creativity performances and learning perceptions. Implications for practice and/or policy Creative problem solving‐based flipped learning has great potential in promoting students’ Creative thinking. Such a learning approach could bring novel ideas into the fields related to creative thinking in addition to arts or performing art courses.

In order to facilitate students' learning performance and ability of knowledge application, flipped learning has been integrated into various disciplines so as to increase students' opportunities to practice and solve their learning difficulties under the teacher's guidance. Nonetheless, previous flipped studies focused more on students' performances in terms of cognition, while courses aimed at training students' skills and strategies have generally been ignored. To address this issue, the present study proposes the “Scaffolding, Questioning, Interflow, Reflection and Comparison” (SQIRC-based mobile flipped learning) approach to strengthen pre-class guidance and in-class reflection by referring to the theories of cognitive apprenticeship and reflective practice. To examine the effects of the SQIRC-based learning approach, the current study adopted a quasi-experiment in the billiards course at a university. A total of 35 students were recruited as the experimental group who adopted the SQIRC-based mobile flipped learning approach, while 40 students in the control group adopted the conventional mobile flipped learning approach. The findings indicated that the SQIRC-based mobile flipped learning significantly improved the students' performance on billiards striking strategies, self-efficacy, and learning motivation. It is verified that the design of video-recording activities with reflection and comparison guidance is the key to promoting students' billiards strategies and skills in flipped learning, which can effectively stimulate students' self-reflection, and promote the improvement of sports performance, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation. At the same time, it fully presents the design of teaching activities before and during class, and contributes to theory and teaching practice. In addition, discussion of the findings, limitations of the present study, and suggestions for generalizing the proposed approach to other application domains are provided.

To return a serve, one must pick up information from the server’s kinematics and anticipate the ball trajectory. Although the perceptual requirements are important, the literature diverges in terms of the differences between experts and novices as well as the importance of the experimental paradigm (in-situ vs. video-based) for the results. This study aimed to address both concerns. We compared experts’ (n=7, 20.6±1.1 year of age) and novices’ (n=7, 20.0±0.4 years of age) visual pattern when returning a serve (Experiment 1) and the influence of the experimental paradigm in experts (Experiment 2). Experts fixated more and longer the upper body and ball, while novices showed a more distributed pattern and with longer fixations outside of the server’s body. Also, the pattern was different when comparing in-situ and laboratory settings, differing mainly in fixation frequency. The influence of expertise was observed in qualitative (relative) and quantitative (absolute) measures of visual behavior with the setting having an important influence. Thus, studies should be as close to the actual situation if trying to understand experts’ behavior.

Dance courses aim to not only intensify learners’ dance skills, but also cultivate their personal dancing features, self-confidence, self-reflection ability, creative power, appreciation ability, to name just a few, in order to attain much higher level artistic performance. In the present study, an approach which integrates mobile peer assessment into flipped learning is proposed. Moreover, a 9-week experiment was conducted to explore the effects of the approach on students’ dance skills, self-efficacy, and learning satisfaction. The results indicated that the students learning with the integrated mobile peer assessment and flipped learning approach had better dance skills than those learning with the conventional flipped learning approach and traditional instruction. In terms of self-efficacy, the students learning with the conventional flipped learning approach outperformed those learning with the proposed approach and traditional instruction. In terms of learning satisfaction, the conventional flipped learning approach outperformed the traditional instruction. Discussion and suggestions are provided accordingly. It is suggested that teachers who want to incorporate flipped learning into dance courses may decide whether to combine peer assessment according to the teaching objectives.