Society expects that sports participants demonstrate sportsmanship, and fair play in sport. However, elite sport players continue to lose control of their personal emotions, and react violently to ethical and moral abuses on the field and court. Because many flagrant fouls and poor sports behaviors are televised into our living rooms, children watch their sport role models misbehavior on the sports field or court just at the time when they are learning to distinguish “right” from “wrong.” It is not surprising that children and youth attempt to emulate their role models by displaying many antisocial and bullying behaviors they see on the sports field.The research goal of this proposal is to examine how students make ethical and moral decisions within sport contexts using virtual reality technology. An interdisciplinary team of researchers will develop this new approach to study and teach the concept of fair play using virtual reality technology.The proposed research program will use conceptual change theory to examine how children’s mental models of fair play develop and grow more sophisticated as a result of the Fair Play Curriculum taught in their youth sport team.Theorists propose that individuals begin with naïve theories learned at home that are heavily influenced by family culture, peers, and other significant individuals and life events. As individuals are exposed to alternative perspectives through formal education and training, their original mental models of phenomena change gradually to become synthetic combinations of their original beliefs. It is possible to describe and measure the growth of mental models through methodologies that assess students’ knowledge and decision- making.In this joint research project, youth players will be immersed in five to ten soccer virtual reality scenarios using three-dimensional (3-D) televisions and 3-D glasses. They will “see” the situation develop as though they were standing on an actual soccer field. In fact, they will be in the laboratory viewing a 3-D video of soccer scenarios. We will pause the video at critical points in the decision making process to permit players to consider and respond to ethical and moral questions. Each possible answer will then be “played out” on the video soccer field so players can “see and participate” in each response. Then they will be asked to select the “fair play” response from those posed. We will analyze players’ responses to the video and inventory using ethical and moral reasoning rubrics that reflect a range of mental models of fair play development.
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