Introduction: One of the ways of thinking is the philosophical one, and what is obvious is that determining the aims and procedures of any undertaking and evaluating the results will be senseless without understanding its philosophical underpinnings. Due to this, the researchers in this study tried to investigate the effects of teaching philosophical underpinnings of physical education to students of sport management for a semester.
Methodology: The research approach of this study was in the form of pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design with the use of questionnaires as research tool. To this end, participants of this study were 140 undergraduate male and female sport management students of Islamic Azad Universities of Guilan province who were majoring in sport management for the educational year 2015-2016. Before and after the semester, all participants were evaluated with the use of philosophical mentality questionnaire of Talebpour et al. (2005). This 60-item questionnaire has three dimensions namely as “reflection, flexibility, and comprehensiveness” each including 20 questions in the questionnaire. To compare the philosophical mentality and its factors before and after the treatment, the Wilcoxon test has been used with a significant level of 05/0 ≥ p. The data were analyzed with the use of the SPSS software.
Results: The mean of the philosophical mentality of all students of physical education before the treatment was 77.165 which grew to 84.169 after the treatment. Moreover, the mean of reflection, flexibility, and comprehensiveness before the treatment was 47.58, 63.55, and 67.51 which grew to 57.59, 56.29, and 53 after the treatment respectively. The results indicated after 16 sessions of instruction of the philosophy of physical education we witnessed a statistically significant improvement in the philosophical mentality of the students.
Discussions: The instruction of philosophical principles influences the philosophical mentality of the students, that is, it improves the dimensions of philosophical mentality including reflection, flexibility, and comprehensiveness in a meaningful way. In other words, the reason behind this improvement was the meaningful improvement in reflection, flexibility, and comprehensiveness dimensions of such students. Therefore, it is highly recommended that the instruction of philosophical underpinnings of physical education be in the curricula of physical education majors; moreover, its instruction should be emphasized in in-service, and synergy and convergence faculty meetings, and decision-making units of sport organizations.