Chapter 10: Teaching New Skills to Beginning Athletes Flashcards
What types of behaviours are likely to be displayed by individuals referred to as “coachable” athletes?
Listening attentively to the coach, picking up equipment after a game, practicing an exercise as instructed, going to a particular place on the playing field when coach blows his whistle, and practicing on their own.
Briefly list four guidelines for instructing beginning athletes about skills to be mastered.
1) Combine modeling with instructions.
2) Ask questions to test for understanding.
3) Explain consequences of correct and incorrect performance.
4) Ask athletes to role-play skills.
Distinguish between programmed reinforcers and natural reinforcers.
Natural reinforcers are those that immediately follow behaviour in the normal course of everyday living. Programmed reinforcers are deliberately manipulated in order to change behaviour.
What are two reasons for encouraging coaches to capitalize on natural reinforcers?
1) The more that beginners experience the natural reinforcers of performing a skill, the greater the likelihood that they will practice that skill on their own.
2) Capitalizing on natural reinforcers in the natural environment is an important tactic for programming generalization of a skill from practices to competitions and for maintaining it in the long run.
Distinguish between prescriptive praise and regular or non-prescriptive praise. Give an example of each that is not in this chapter.
Prescriptive praise is when the coach identifies the aspect of the athlete’s performance that was desirable or that indicated improvement, as opposed to non-prescriptive praise which is more general. An example is a coach telling a basketball player “I love your followthrough on that shot. Keep it up!”. Regular praise is simply saying “Nice shot”… this doesn’t identify why they are being praised.
Define “shaping” and describe a sport example that is not in this chapter.
Shaping is the reinforcement of successive approximations of increasingly close attempts at correct execution, one approximation at a time, until the desired response occurs. For example, a swimming coach praises a swimmer as she slowly learns different parts of the swimming form she is being taught, and praising her as she gets closer and closer to the correct stroke.
In a sentence for each, what is shaping used for? And what is chaining used for?
Shaping can be a powerful technique for coaches to modify the form, frequency, duration, latency, intensity, and stimulus control of a behaviour. Chaining can be used to teach a young athlete to perform a specific series of steps that are linked together.
Define stimulus control and describe a sport example from this chapter.
Stimulus control: the degree of correlation between a stimulus and a behaviour. For an athlete to be successful in any sport, certain stimuli must exert control over certain operant behaviours of that athlete. Example: the stimulus of an open receiver must control the passing behaviour of a quarterback in football, even in the face of charging linemen from the opposing team.
State four reasons why a coach should continue to dispense deliberately-programmed reinforcers to beginning athletes, even after their athletic skills appear to have come under the control of natural reinforcers.
1) Although natural reinforcers might maintain skills in competitive environments, reinforcers from the coach can help to sustain effort and performance during repetitive practices.
2) Competitive situations contain punishers as well as natural rewards. For example, over-exuberant parents might yell at their child following a loss. This may make it difficult for that athlete to focus on improvements in his/her personal skills (as a reinforcer). In such situations, positive feedback from the coach contingent upon skilled play can help maintain those skills.
3) An athlete rarely reaches the point where there is nothing left to learn. The coach should therefore continue to provide reinforcers for slight improvements to encourage individual players to continually improve and refine their skills to a higher level.
4) Intermittent schedules of reinforcement influence individuals to work consistently. Occasional deliberately-programmed reinforcers from the coach will have that effect.
List the 6 characteristics of effective behavioural coaching.
1) Emphasizes specific measurement of athletic performance and the use of such measures as the primary means for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching strategies.
2) Recognizes a clear distinction between developing and maintaining behaviour and positive behavioural procedures are available for accomplishing both.
3) Encourages coaches to help athletes improve as measured against their own previous performance, as opposed to being compared to other athletes.
4) Emphasizes that coaches use behaviour modification procedures that have been experimentally demonstrated to be effective.
5) Characteristics suggest that behaviour modification techniques can also be applied to help the coach change his behaviour.
6) Coaches are encouraged to use social validity assessments to ensure the the athletes, parents, and others involved in the program are satisfied with the target behaviours that were identified, the coaching procedures that were used, and the results that were obtained.
