STUDY WEEK - PRACTICE DESIGN PART 1

 

This is a bloody long one so it will take 2 posts to cover but as always lot of points to get the coaching-thinking juices flowing and they can also be immediately implemented in your own coaching sessions.

• There are 3 types of practice x practice to learn, practice to transfer to competition and practice to maintain current skills
• Increased difficulty during practice might be detrimental to short term performance but beneficial for long term performance
• The challenge point framework refers to skill acquisition via accumulated playing experiences and is highly compatible with desirable difficulties for learning and cognitive load theory
• Difficulties/challenges in practice can be beneficial for learning but they can also have motivational costs such as introducing more errors into practice/performance which can have implications on competence perception and meeting your own competence needs for motivation
• Reduced motivation can have negative effects on learning as learners may stop practice sooner and also reduced motivation can make learning less effective
• Not all difficulties are equally beneficial for learning as it’s not the difficulty level that boosts learning but the psychological processes which are engaged by the difficulty
• These types of process difficulties have been termed desirable because they beneficially enhance encoding of information and its retrieval
• To determine which difficulties are desirable to practice specificity, refer to do the constraints of practice and if they match those in competition
• The optimal difficulty for an individual is a moving target across practice sessions or across seasons
• The difficulty of a particular practice scenario can change in the short term due to things like fatigue/arousal as well as over the long term as a result of learning, and therefore goals of practice may change such as using high functional difficulty to optimise learning/improvement or at a lower relative level reinforcing successes/promoting competence
• Retention/transfer differentially impact practice decisions where you can learn/execute a skill at training not in games from a lack of practice game representation and experiences that scaffold on an initial narrow set of practice/performance conditions
• Adding new information/degree of uncertainty + finding the optimal level of difficulty/challenge is how you  individualise each players challenge point
• Individual differences can make a task more/less difficulty for each person = functional task difficulty
• Perceived difficulty vary over attempts from the same athlete or between athletes of similar skill levels
• Nominal task difficulty is a more objective property of the task which remains the same regardless of the person
• Block training beats random training for short term improvements giving the illusion of learning/retention but random beats blocked for long term retention
• Desirable difficulties includes to trying an action before been shown how to it, the spacing out of practice for different skills to make them harder to recall and self testing
• Low challenge = high performance
• High challenge = low performance
• Low challenge = low learning
• High challenge (relative to challenge point) = high learning
• In the optimal challenge point zone there can be a small performance drop but not so much that it overburden’s the learner but is also where learning will be greatest because of the availability of new/unexpected information
• If athletes are to do more than simply maintain skill level then they must be pushed out of their comfort zone to a place where they don’t know what to expect and how to respond to new information
• For beginners, new information can be found in relatively low level challenges while still creating uncertainty and in order to make this new information usable, the coach plays a valuable role in determining/directing attention to key information via task specific constraints, rule changes or augmenting practice through verbal instruction/video
• As individuals increase in skill the amount of information available for learning starts to shrink so the practice environment needs to be more challenging/stretching so new information is constantly becoming available
• For intermediates less information/uncertainty is available when challenge is low but increases rapidly when challenge is increased
• When there is uncertainty in what's being performed, information matters and learning opportunities are enhanced
• There is a link between learning to expectations and in particular the violation of these expectations such as how a movement is expected to look/feel, then the motor system detects such violations and uses them as a signal for learning
• When expectations are met, our internal models of the world are reinforced and no change is needed
• By increasing the difficulty of practice, expect a drop in performance such reductions in accuracy, slower and more variable movements, or both and is a signal of learning as information gained from unsuccessful attempts are used to adjust/refine future movements
• Coaches also need to consider the potential motivational costs of errors for both the learner as a person with psychological/safety needs and for learning as a physical process where too high a challenge will be highly frustrating/de-motivational but too low can be de/motivating for different individual’s, as it can meet the need for competence but also be boring

Part 2 coming Friday - AFLW Film Review tomorrow.