The use of instructional materials in physical education to enhance the students’ knowledge and skills in swimming and life-saving techniques

John B. Lacson Foundation Maritime University (Arevalo), Inc. is mandated to offer aquatic-sports courses such as paddling, rowing, sailing, and swimming to equip students with needed skills essential for survival in case of emergencies. Since, there is a dearth of instructional materials in Physical Education 2 (Advanced Swimming and Life-saving Techniques), the JBLFMU-Arevalo was given a research grant by the CHED (Commission on Higher Education) known as DARE TO (Discovery Applied Research and Extension Trans/Inter-Disciplinary Opportunities) to address the problem. This DARE TO grant aimed to develop instructional materials in PE 2 that will enhance the swimming performance and life-saving techniques of students. That is why the researchers would like to test for the effectiveness of this instructional material in the form of modules over the traditional approach which is lecture in improving the students’ swimming performance and life-saving techniques in terms of their knowledge and skills. This non-equivalent control group under quasi-experimental study was utilized among the BSMT (Bachelor of Science in Marine Transportation) students. A pretest was used to determine swimming performance of the experimental and control groups. An intervention through the use of instructional materials was employed in the experimental group for the whole semester (five months) while the control group was exposed to lecture as a traditional method of instruction. After a semester, the posttest was administered. The statistical tools used were mean, standard deviation, Mann-Whitney test, and Wilcoxon-signed ranks test. The findings of the study revealed that the instructional material is effective in enhancing the swimming performance and life-saving techniques of students both in the aspects of knowledge and skills. Both the experimental and control groups were “Fair” in their knowledge pretest scores but during the posttest, the experimental group was “Good” and the control group was “Fair”. On the other hand, both the experimental and control groups were “Fair” in their skills’ pretest scores but during their posttest, the control group was “Good” while the experimental group was “Excellent”. The experimental group who used the module showed significantly better performance during the posttest both for knowledge and skills compared to the control group who did not use the module (lecture only). The study further showed significant differences in the mean gains between the experimental and control groups after the conduct of pretest and posttest in favor of the experimental group. It can be gleaned from the results that the module can enhance the knowledge and skills in swimming performance and life-saving techniques of the experimental group. It is highly recommended that this module be utilized among maritime schools offering swimming and life-saving courses.