Specialisation and Readiness Flashcards
What are the prerequisites to be ready for competition?
- Motivational Readiness
- Cognitive Readiness
- Physical Readiness
Who proposed the 3 prerequisites for competition readiness?
Passer and Wilson 2002
What is motivational readiness?
When a child:
- actively seeks opportunities to engage in social comparison
- Wishes to evaluate his/her ability relative to peers
- benefits more from competition than unstructured play
What are the milestones for development of self evaluation according to Passer and Wilson 2002?
- Self Referenced (0-2.5yrs)
- Compete for opportunity (2.5-4yrs)
- Social Comparison (4-6yrs)
- Active Competition (6-9yrs)
What did Pascuzzi (1981) investigate to better understand competition readiness?
-Investigated how placing in a race affected children’s mood, self-concept and expectancy beliefs
What were the findings of Pascuzzi (1981)?
- Placing influenced post-race affect in pre-school boys but not girls
- in 2nd grade, placing impacted chrildrens;
- -affect
- -self-perception
- -expectancy for future success
What did Butler (1996) investigate to better understand competition readiness?
- Paired artwork task
- kids were placed next to eachother to paint
- Two groups; one group focused on being creative. The other group competed to make the ‘best’ paintaing
What were the findings of Butler 1996?
- 5-6 year olds glanced more often to ‘get ideas’
- 9-10 year olds gave more competitive reasons for glancing
- Children in urban schools and in the ‘competition’ group gave more competitive reasons
What did Donzella et al (2000) investigate to better understand the consequences of early competition?
- A Memory game with 3-5 year olds
- Staged series of 8 games (WWWLLLWW)
- Had to win 5 out of 8 games to win a prize
What were the findings of Donzella et al 2000?
-When losing, children experienced increased HR, tension, impulsivity, anger and sadness, less positive affect and more cheating
What is Cognitive Readiness?
-When a child has developed sufficient informational processing abilities, attributional abilities, and role-perspective
Explain the process of informational processing development in children
- Before 4yrs, children are easily distracted
- 10-12yrs attention span is better
- Memory capacity improves in late childhood; allows for sophisticated strategy and less cue dependent
Explain the process of attributional ability development in children
- 4-7yrs attribute outcome to difficulty, not ability or effort. Less able to rationalise success or failure and predict future outcomes.
- 9-12yrs can differentiate ability and effort; more adaptive at coping with failure
Explain the process of role-perspective development in children
- pre 6yrs, totally egocentric
- 6-8yrs, developing understanding of other people’s view develops
- 8-10yrs, others views are understood and accepted
- 10-12yrs group perspective develops
What is parental readiness?
When a parent
- Respects the child’s right to compete or not
- Allows child to sample sports
- avoids ‘reverse dependency trap’
- Share the child with the coach
- avoids bein overprotective
- Accepts child’s disappointments
Who wrote about parental readiness?
Smoll and Cumming 2006
when do fundamental motor skills like throwing, kicking, jumping, running, etc. develop typically?
Typically matured at 8 to 9 years old
Why is it hard to pinpoint an age that physical readiness for competition occurs?
-Children develop at different rates. Physical AND motor development rate is highly variable
What happens when less physically competent children take part in competition?
- Less success and enjoyment
- Less attention
- Greater anxiety and self handicapping
- Minimum effort/sabotage activity
- Illness/injury
- More likely to dropout
Give an example where success was achieved without early specialisation
Jim Lui; youngest junior amateur US champion in golf in 63 years. Sampled many sports as a kid and didn’t play golf until 7 yrs old
Define Specialisation
- Early involvement in sport
- Limit participation to single sport; year round
- Emphasis on deliberate practice over play
- Athletic excellence is the primary objective
Who defined specialisation?
Cote et al 2007
Who wrote about the driving factors for specialisation?
Baker 2003
What support exists for early specialisation?
- 10 year rule supported in chess, math, music, tennis, swimming, running (Ericsson et al 1993)
- Increased emphasis on deliberate practice enhances skill acquisition in olympic gymnasts (Law et al 2007)
