A Study on the Characteristics of Student Athletes at Universities in Guizhou Province
Authors: Wang Tianyuan 
Published: January 2025

Background and Aim: Developing China into a formidable sports nation necessitates the support of top-tier talents, while the advancement of sports higher education serves as a crucial underpinning for nurturing skilled sports professionals. The pedagogy within sports education is notably distinct, with sports students embodying a uniquely central role in the learning process. Consequently, enhancing the caliber of sports education demands an exploration of pedagogical strategies not solely from the educators' viewpoint but also through an investigation into the distinctive attributes of sports students as active participants in their learning journey.
Materials and Methods: The study commenced with interviews involving 13 sports educators from Chinese universities to identify elements pertinent to evaluating university sports students' learning characteristics from the educators' viewpoint. Grounded in the learner characteristics theory, the analysis framework's structure was established. After this, exploratory factor analysis was employed to affirm the validity of the proposed research framework. Leveraging this framework and incorporating established scales, the "Questionnaire on Characteristics of University Sports Students as Learners" was constructed. A cohort of 700 sports students, ranging from freshmen to juniors, participated in the survey. The gathered data underwent extensive analysis to investigate the prevailing learner characteristics among university sports students in Guizhou Province.
Results: The research identified three pivotal learner characteristics in university sports students: cognitive, emotional, and ability-related components. The cognitive facet involves learning attitudes and motivation; the emotional facet comprises self-efficacy and anxiety; and the ability facet includes learning strategies and training investment. Analysis of the data revealed no significant gender-based differences in these characteristics. However, it highlighted notable disparities across academic years: freshmen exhibited the highest scores in cognitive components, followed by sophomores, with juniors registering the lowest scores. In the assessment of emotional aspects, sophomores outperformed though the margin of difference was nominal between the freshmen and juniors. Conversely, in the evaluation of ability aspects, juniors achieved significantly greater scores compared to their freshmen and sophomore counterparts. Regarding college entrance examination performance, a discernible trend indicated that higher scores in the cultural section correlated positively with enhanced performance across all evaluated elements and their respective dimensions. However, this correlation was not observed in sports examination scores, which did not demonstrate significant differences in cognitive aspects but did reveal disparities in both ability and emotional aspects.
Conclusion: The performance of student-athletes across ability, emotional, and cognitive dimensions is affected by a multitude of factors, such as gender, academic year, cultural course grades, physical education assessments, and sports exam scores. To enhance the overall quality and performance of sports students, emphasis should be placed on fostering their learning competencies, emotional equilibrium, and cognitive capabilities, and developing tailored training initiatives that account for varying academic levels and individual differences. Additionally, we should strengthen the comprehensive evaluation and assessment of students' overall qualities to more effectively facilitate their all-encompassing growth.