Abstract

The majority of the schools of physical education and sports in Turkey consist of three departments, which are physical education and sports teaching department, coaching education and sports management departments. All of these departments are applying similar entrance examinations, and mostly similar curriculum and learning styles to the students. The purpose of the present study was to determine multiple intelligence domains of the School of Physical Education and Sports’ students, and to compare them according to variables of departments. "Multiple Intelligence Scale" designed by McClellan and Conti was the medium of the data collection procedure. The scale was applied to 285 participants (113 female and 172 males), recruited from the School of Physical Education and Sports of Cumhuriyet University. The average age of the participants was 21.37 (20.67 for females and 21.84 for males). Values obtained from the scale were statistically analysed using SPSS by means of frequencies and percentages, ANOVA and “Student's t-test”. Alpha level was set as 0.05 for statistical significance.

Intra-personal intelligence was determined as the highest intelligence area for the students of all three groups recruited from each department. After bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, existential intelligence was found to be the second highest area for students of coaching education department, unlike the other two departments. According to this, the curriculum and learning methods applied to the students should be re-evaluated by taking the differences in the dominant intelligence areas between the departments into consideration.

Key words: Multiple intelligence, physical education and sports teaching, coaching education, sports management.