NEXT LEVEL COACHING - LEARNING = PERFORMANCE (PART 1)

                                     

We train.

We train to learn.

We learn to become better players/teams.

We become better players/teams from learning.

Learning = Performance!

Last week I did a 2 part series on coaching aspects to nail in season 2022 and here's another that you can add to your list - create a learning-rich training environment.

Below you'll find points I took from an article I can't relocate on pioneering teachers Elisabeth and Robert Bjork whose research since the early 1970's has taught us how we best learn and than apply skills an knowledge.

This article will be a 2-parter with a 3rd part later in the week showing how this might look in a training activity.

- Re-reading materal can provide a sense of familiaraity and perceptual fluency that we interpret as understanding ad comprehension but is actually low level perceptual priming

- Information coming readily to mind can be interpreted as evidence of learning but it can simply be a product of cues that are present in a familiar study situation but then they aren’t available at a later time in a different context

- Rapid improvement does not support long term retention and transfer where as conditions that create challenges that provide a slow rate of apparent learning often optimise long term retention an transfer (think habit forming)

- Substantial improvement in performance in training can occur without significant learning, as revealed when perfoming that skill/task again after a time delay or in another context (good last week, not so good this week)

- Storage strength reflects how entrenched a memory and how it can be retrieved and then used in many situations

- Retrieval strength reflects the current accessibility of that repetition and is heavily influenced by situational cues and the recency of study and exposure

- Conditions that most rapidly increase retrieval strength differ from the conditions that maximise gains in storage strength

- If you interpret current retrieval strength as storage strength then you become susceptible to preferring poorer conditions of learning to better conditions of learning

- Vary the conditions of learning over being constant and predictable, interleave instruction on separate topics over grouping instruction by topic and block learning, use spacing over massing and use study sessions on a given topic using tests over presentations as study events

- Make these difficulties desirerable by matching them with the learners current ability, or they will ultimately become undesireable and a poor learning environment will follow

- Studying the same material in 2 different rooms, rather then twice in the same room, leads to an increase in the ability to recall that material so vary the environment where possible

- 1 study had children throwing beanbags at a target on the floor but with occluded vision for each throw but with 1 group throwing from the same distance each throw (from the actual study testing distance) and the other group throwing from different distances each throw but never from the study testing distance where the 2nd group performed better even though theye never even practices from the study testing distance at all

- This study suggests that the 2nd group needed to adjust the parameters of the motor program corresponding to the throwing motion, which is a transferrable process and skill for any type of throw

Part 2 on Wednesday.