Term of Award

Spring 2010

Degree Name

Master of Science in Kinesiology (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Health and Kinesiology

Committee Chair

Thomas Buckley

Committee Member 1

Glenn Burdette

Committee Member 2

Daniel Czech

Committee Member 3

Barry Joyner

Abstract

According to the National Athletic Trainers' Association only 42% of high schools in the United States have an Athletic Trainer at their High School, therefore when athletes get injured the coaches are often the first responder. This is a challenging situation when it comes to concussions as previous investigations have identified numerous concussion related misconceptions by coaches. To educate the coaches about concussions, the CDC developed the "Heads-Up: Concussion in High School Sports" toolkit in 2005; however the effectiveness of this toolkit has surprisingly received limited investigation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess coaching education students' concussion knowledge immediately following the CDC's Heads-Up DVD and four weeks later. A potential of 54 item electronic survey. Electronic survey on each schools' online course management system. The respondents (N= 169 age= 22.4 male= 76.9%) represented undergraduate and graduate coaching education students at two regional state universities. The survey was distributed online (host site surveymonkey.com), based on the CDC's Heads-Up DVD, and links to the survey were posted on each institution's course management website. There were three test dates: pre, post and a four week follow up. There was no difference (F₁=1.64; P=0.202) in the mean overall score between pre (x=25.65±3.87), post (x=26.12±3.29), and follow up (x=25.32±3.97). There was no significant difference between subjects who had a history of concussion and those that had not (F₁=1.54; P=0.220); between delivery methods at any of the assessment time points (F₁=2.11; P=0.132); between student degree levels at the pre-assessment or post-assessment (F₁=0.00; P=0.992). There was no significant difference between the three assessment dates (F₁=2.85; P=0.067) for the mean number of correct responses for the 16-symptom checklist. We found that the CDC's Heads-Up DVD did not increase the coaching education students' knowledge of sports-related concussions. Even immediately after the coaching students watched the DVD there were no significant improvements. Therefore it is suggested that new informative measure be made to help educate coaches about concussions. This could include a new DVD with more current information and presented in a way that coaches can better understand and improve their concussion knowledge.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

Download

Share

COinS