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'Development, Enhancement and Sustainability of Expert Performance in Sport'

Feb 11

Written by: jboone
2/11/2009 11:05 AM 

DEVELOPMENT, ENHANCEMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY OF EXPERT PERFORMANCE IN SPORT

On November 13 -14, 2008, the United States Olympic Committee hosted a conference focusing on Expert Performance in Sport. This was the last conference in the 2008 Educational Series. Five of the top experts in the World presented to coaches and Coach Educators about their research and it’s implication to sport. This article provides key points made by each of the presenters on their topic.


K. Anders Ericsson, PhD, studies the cognitive structure of expert performance in domains such as music, chess and sports, and how expert performers attain their superior performance by acquiring complex cognitive mechanisms and physiological adaptations through extended deliberate practice. He has edited several books on expertise and most recently Expert Performance in Sports (2001) and “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance” (2006) and “Development of Professional Expertise: Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments” (in press).

Key Points from K. Anders Ericsson: Development of Skills in High Level Performances
  • Practice for practice sake is not beneficial to improve expert performance. “Deliberate practice”- practice with goals and expectations along with monitoring by a coach are what make a difference. This can be done through “individualized training activities especially designed by a coach or teacher to improve specific aspects of an individual’s performance through repetition and successive refinement. To receive maximal benefit from feedback individuals have to monitor their training with full concentration, which is effortful and limits the duration of daily training.” (Ericsson and Lehmann) The idea is that the athlete stretches themselves into areas where they have to full concentrate to gain benefit.
  • Expert’s become expert with 10,000 hours or ten years of deliberate practice. Less accomplished performers have lower numbers of hours spent in deliberate practice. The most important aspect is the number of hours spent in deliberate practice refining their skills. Time appears to be the major factor, not ability or talent. Child prodigies are starting their training time earlier and have more hours of practice at an earlier age.
  • Expert’s can see the situation and make decision regarding the situation quicker than beginner’s.
  • Practicing skills by themselves is a hallmark of expert performers at all stages of development. Expert chess players spent more than 6,000 hours studying chess games of the masters, not playing chess games. The student was trying to predict the next move of the expert player and compared their move to see if they made the same move—if not – what did the expert see.
  • Skilled performance is not correlated to IQ.
  • Expert performances are more consistent in duplicating their skills than recreational level athletes.
  • Experience is necessary and can not be substituted for.
  • The building blocks for success are: Solid Fundamentals- Refined representations- speed and articulation.

Richard A. Schmidt, PhD, is known as one of the research leaders in human motor behavior (or human performance); Dr. Schmidt has more than 35 years’ experience in this area and has published widely--150 articles and three books. He currently runs his own consulting firm, Human Performance Research, in Los Angeles, where he works in the area of human factors and ergonomics. Human factors are the field of study concerned with the interaction of (a) human capabilities/limitations and (b) the design of “things” (broadly defined, such as toasters, cars, software, etc.).

Key Points from Dick Schmidt: Principles of Practice for the Development of Skilled Actions
  • The difference between “Blocked” and “Random” practice were analyzed for effectiveness. An example of blocked practice was a child learning multiplication tables and the teacher continued to ask 5 x 5 =?. After a period of time, the child does not think about the answer or the process and just responds. An example of random practice would be that the coach is working on three different aspects (1, 2 & 3), the coach would have the athlete work on 1, then 3, then 1, then 2, then 3, then 2. The athlete would not know what to expect at practice and would have to “retrieve” information to perform each task. One of the key points is not to practice similar skills one after the other as some confusion may occur. (Example: Dribbling around cones, shoot free throw, dribble around cones, shoot lay-up, shoot free throw, shoot lay-up, dribble around cones).
  • Block practice is good for performance of the skill, but random is better for competition skills.
  • It is important for athletes to develop “retrieval skills” for playing sports and making decisions in games. One way to help develop those skills is “spaced practice”. You work on the skill and a couple of hours/days repeat the skill to see if the athlete can retrieve it from their memory.
  • FEEDBACK-the single most important factor in learning a skill.
  • The coach typically provides feedback to the athlete, although the athlete can learn to provide themselves with feedback based on the both process and outcome.
  • Various types of feedback:
    • Augmented- The coach provides “augmented feedback” either about the outcome or the quality of the action.
    • Summary- Provide feedback back after 5, 10 or 15 performances of a skill. To retain the skill after it is learned, summary feedback after 10 or 15 performances is beneficial type.
    • Instantaneous- while this is the tendency for most coaches—this is the least beneficial.
    • Continuous and Concurrent- this type of feedback is less effective for retention.
    • Bandwidth- The coach establishes a high level and a low level of acceptable performances and makes comments only when the performance is on either side of the “bandwidth”.
Dr. Peter Vint is a senior sport technologist with the United States Olympic Committee’s Performance Services Division. Dr. Vint received his B.S. in Sports Science Research with a minor in Mathematics from Northern Illinois University in 1989, and his M.S. in Biomechanics from the University of Delaware in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. in Biomechanics at Arizona State University in 1997 and was subsequently employed as an assistant professor in Biomechanics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Prior to accepting his current position with the USOC, Dr. Vint held a postdoctoral fellowship in motor control at Arizona State University and was hired as a research scientist with a human factors research firm in Tempe, Arizona.

Key Points from Peter Vint: Feedback Theory and Application: Best Practices and Practical Solutions

The three types of instructional styles are:
    • Explicit- Coach defines process- athlete just acts
    • Implicit- athlete figures out the relationships and rules themselves
    • Guided Discovery- coach provides clues and athlete establishes relationships and rules
  • Six feedback considerations
  1. Provide feedback and design practices to maximize learning and competition performance
  2. Provide feedback that athletes cannot obtain themselves.
  3. Help athletes become introspective and independent.
  4. When ready, provide athletes opportunity to control delivery of feedback.
  5. Prioritize feedback so it can be acted upon in the time frame considered.
  6. Provide feedback more frequently during early skill acquisition phase, less frequently later (fade out the feedback).
  • Deterministic Modeling- helps the coach by showing the relationships between a performance/skill and the factors that contribute to the performance or skill. It is a flow chart of factors that help a coach prioritize training emphasis and determines factors that contribute to performance. The process helps the coach define the direction of training.
  • Making a rubric—once the coach understands the skill and the components of the skill- a rubric can be designed to provide an evaluation tool. The coach can isolate sections of the skill to evaluate and provide feedback to the athlete.

A. Mark Williams is Professor of Motor Behavior at the Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, UK. His research interests focus on expertise and its acquisition across domains, with a particular focus on expert performance, skill acquisition and effective practice and instruction. Over the last 10 years, he has received more than $4 million in external support and has been funded by Research Councils such as the Economic and Social Research Council and British Academy, by commercial companies such as Nike and Umbro, by Federal agencies such as the Office of Naval Research, and by National Governing Bodies of Sport such as the Football Association, UEFA, FIFA, the English Cricket Board, Sports Coach UK and UK Sport. These grants have largely focused on issues related to skill acquisition, simulation training and effective practice and instruction.

Key Points from Mark Williams: Anticipation Skill in Sport: From Testing to Training
  • There is no difference between an expert performer and beginner as far as visual measures—experts do not have superior visual function or visual acuity. The difference in the expert and beginner is how the expert processes the information that the eye intakes.
  • Anticipation skills are used to try to predict the movement of an opponent or object.
  • Expert athletes have the ability to pick-up advanced postural anticipation cues. Positioning of hips, shoulders and feet provide the expert valuable cues as well as the speed of the ball or opponent. They are much better developing cues prior to ball contact. Experts use more and more varied cues than a beginning athlete, who uses a smaller number of postural cues.
  • Expert athletes could view film and recognize patterns of play that they had previously seen. This skill allows them to process information in a more meaningful manner to their play – they see patterns and structures.
  • Using eye tracking equipment, research shows that experts use more effective visual search strategies. Expert athletes look at different areas, for different periods of time than beginners. Beginners tend to watch the ball more and the expert is looking for the pattern of play and searches more of the field. It is more reactive than anticipatory with the beginner.
  • Expert athletes have a greater knowledge of situational probabilities. They have seen the situation and can anticipate probable action. They develop a hierarchy of probability.
  • An enhanced awareness of tactical opportunities is an expert skill. Experts determine the next move prior to receiving the ball.
  • Postural recognition occurs in future elite athletes at around 12. However, those athletes measured had more practice hours than the sub-elite group. It is based on experience.
  • In testing shooter’s, there is a period of eye fixation- “quiet eye period”- those shooter’s who could maintain the time of eye fixation tended to be better shooters.
  • From Theory to Practice: Identify postural cues to teach athletes—you can use video to assist in this, by showing the action that you want the athlete to react to (i.e. goal kick, volleyball set and spike) and asking the athlete to react to the action seen. Experts respond with 90-95% accuracy and with training the beginner will see an increase in response time.
  • Athlete anxiety is lower with guided discovery than with explicit direction.
Key Points from Mark Williams’ second presentation: Practice and Instruction in Sport: Challenging Tradition!
  • Learning- “… a set of processes associated with practice or experience that leads to a relatively permanent change in the capability for movement”. Performance- “… observed behavior”.
  • Expert athletes spent more time in non-coached deliberate play than athletes who were released from teams.
  • Athletes in the Soccer Academy in England spend 18 hours a week in practice. The breakdown of that practice is four hours of team practice, five hours of individual practice and nine hours of deliberate play.
  • For effective learning—the coach should only demonstrate when necessary, only after initial practice on task, have variable and randomness in practice and provide the least amount of feedback.
  • The challenge for the coach is to come up with a way to provide the least amount of instruction.
  • Conveying information to athletes--most coaches demonstrate. The learner picks up the relative motion and/or the coordination pattern of the movement. Demonstration is most effective early in learning. Demonstrations are less effective when trying to refine or scale an existing movement pattern. It is hard to pick up the subtle differences in movements through demonstration.
  • Can demonstrations be detrimental? It is possible that demonstrations stifles creativity in learning, it puts the focus on the technical aspect over what you want for an outcome (action). Children will focus on your feedback, instead of trying to model the form demonstrated. Optimal time for practice is 1-1.5 hours in length but that depends on the nature of the skill/work to rest ratio.
  • Practice when fatigued is detrimental to performance in the practice session. An athlete has to perform when fatigued in competition (sport dependent).
    • Specific practice- repetitive practice of a skill under constant practice conditions (Dick Schmidt’s Blocked practice) better for performance in session.
    • Variable practice- variety within practice conditions (Schmidt’s- Random) is better for learning.
  • Manipulating a variety of factors that might occur during competition is the challenge for the coach, such factors as distance, speed, height or direction of skill.
  • Contextual Interference—Block practice is low in contextual interference. The athlete can focus on one skill with out interference of other skills in the context of the sport. Random practice is high in contextual interference as the athlete practices several skills in a random manner. Low contextual practice is better for performance in a session with high contextual practice is better for overall learning.
  • Combining variable practices with high contextual interference skill with the skills being markedly different is the best method.
  • Feedback
    • Feedback is more important early in the learning stage.
    • It is a factor in the correct development of the skill being learned.
    • The coach wants learner to develop the ability to detect and correct own errors.
    • Feedback frequency should be decreased over time.
  • Prescriptive v. Guided Discovery coaching
    • Prescriptive coaching is where the coach provides all the cues for learning and prescribes activities. Learning is more efficient initially, but skills are more likely to break down under pressure.
    • Guided-Discovery coaching is where the coach guides the athlete into learning the skill by providing opportunity for athlete to learn the skill and the coach provides cues when needed. The skills the athlete learns are more adaptable and unique, they are more resistant to forgetting and less likely to break down under pressure, but it takes more time for the athlete to learn initially.
The next program in the Educational Series will be the Training Design Symposium- March 4-6 in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center.

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