Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This study assesses sport management students’ tolerance for ambiguity (TA), as well as their perceived learning gains, after completing an upper-level, community based learning course. As part of the class, sport management students were responsible for creating, implementing, executing, and evaluating a resource development plan for a local non-profit organization. All are important competencies – requiring the kind of adaptability often reported to be under cultivated in sport management graduates – subsumed within multiple program-specific student learning outcomes. Results indicate that those who had a lower tolerance for ambiguity reached a higher percentage of their goal. Additionally, qualitative analyses of self-reported learning gains indicate students’ perceived ability to effectively fundraise, negotiate the challenges of group work, and gain real-world experience. Other reported benefits include cultivating professional skills (i.e. critical thinking and leadership), personal growth, and vocational exploration. These data also make clear the salience of determining what skills and dispositions are associated with student success, collecting both qualitative and numeric/categorical assessment data, and the importance of considering variables, such as TA, when designing curriculum and assessment measures. Our findings provide a more nuanced picture of students’ TA and suggest that students’ ability to adapt to emergent, real-world situations is not equivalent to feeling comfortable taking on projects in the absence of clear goals. Lastly, our findings fill a gap in the literature regarding how to foster student preparedness for “real world” experiences, and serve as model of how faculty and administrators can successfully integrate CBL in experiential sport management coursework.

Presenters

Kristi Sweeney
Director of Sport Management/Associate Professor, Department of Leadership, School Counseling & Sport Management, Univ of North Florida, Florida, United States

Megan Schramm Schramm-Possinger