Sport Education (SE) is a student-centred instructional model for teaching Physical Education (PE) consistent with socio-constructivist premises where students take on progressively higher responsibility in the construction of their own learning (Hastie et al., 2011; Siedentop, 1994). Accordingly, SE aims at a more holistic and comprehensive development of students, who are educated not only as competent players, but also as literate, and enthusiastic sportspersons (Siedentop, 1994). The PE practice is perceived by students as an authentic and meaningful experience, considering that the learning activities integrate six key features of institutionalized sport, namely, seasons, formal competition, record keeping, affiliation, festivity and culminating event. Therefore, the seasons in SE are longer than the traditional multi-activity short units, students learn several sport roles such as player, referee, captain, statistician and coach, while become members of small, heterogeneous, and persisting teams (Siedentop, 1994). Additionally, students are empowered through curriculum ownership and increasing autonomy fostered by cooperative work within peer teaching tasks (PTT) in which they benefit of social development opportunities and lead a good deal of the instructional process (Carlson & Hastie, 1997; Siedentop, 1998). Thus, the student-coaches have the responsibility to conduct their teams throughout the seasons and to manage instruction within PTT, whereby they are expected to play the role of group learning facilitator.

The impact of the SE model on the students’ learning outcomes have been examined  mainly through five domains (skill development, game play and tactical awareness; fitness; personal/ social development; student’s aptitudes; and values) (Hastie et al., 2011; Wallhead & O'Sullivan, 2005) from which some significant insights have emerged to further research. On one hand,  on SE has emphasised the powerful role that persistent team membership holds in students’ sense of belonging  (MacPhail et al., 2008), while students consistently acknowledge the potential of SE in developing their play/tactical awareness (Grant et al., 1992; Pope & Grant, 1996). On the other hand, the lack of student-coaches’ leadership skills found during PTT instruction is considered potentially problematic for content knowledge development and inherent learning of higher-order sports content by students (Wallhead & O'Sullivan, 2005; Wallhead & O’Sullivan, 2007). Thus, although the issues surrounding content knowledge development have caused some scepticism among teachers about the SE’s potential to promote skills development (Alexander & Luckman, 2001), to date, there is a worrying dearth of research focused on student-coach’s task instruction within the PTT. In agreement, the purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of one student-coachduring task presentation in a SE Athletics unit.

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