The Effect of the REAP Strategy on Volleyball Officiating Performance among Third-Year Students at the College of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, University of Wasit

Abstract

The REAP strategy offers substantial educational benefits by promoting comprehension rather than rote memorization. Its stages encourage analysis and reflection, enabling students to develop ideas and process information by organizing, encoding, and reformulating it according to their own understanding and in their own words. The strategy also promotes classroom participation by transforming learners from passive recipients into active participants in the learning process. Furthermore, it fosters learner autonomy and self-directed learning while accommodating individual differences by allowing students to engage with learning tasks according to their abilities and pace. The significance of the present study stems from the nature of volleyball officiating, which requires officials to interpret situations accurately, identify and correct errors promptly, make decisive judgments, and integrate prior knowledge with new information. The research problem emerged from the researcher's interaction with students, during which questions concerning volleyball officiating signals revealed weaknesses in their officiating performance and their ability to execute the required signals. An examination of their grades also indicated inconsistent performance, with achievement generally remaining at a moderate level. Accordingly, this study aimed to design instructional units based on the REAP strategy for third-year students to improve their volleyball officiating performance and to investigate the effect of this strategy on that performance. The study hypothesized that statistically significant differences would exist between the pre-test and post-test results of the experimental and control groups in volleyball officiating performance, as well as between the groups' post-test results, in favor of the experimental group. The research population comprised 150 third-year students enrolled at the College of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, University of Wasit, during the 2025–2026 academic year. The main study sample consisted of 60 students selected from Sections C and F. The officiating assessment form was developed and processed through a systematic, sequential set of methodological procedures.