Ecological Dynamics and Motor Learning Design in Sport

 

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Detailed Notes on Eco D and Motor Learning Design in Sport

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. The article starts with talking about how skill acquisition is viewed from an Ecological Dynamics perspective. In Eco D good performance is adapting your movements to suit the everchanging environments.
2. Talks about some of the principles of good practice design and how learning takes place from an Ecological Dynamics perspective.
3. Finishes with talking about how we can design learning environments and what we need to make sure we are doing

🤝Impressions

Even though I have quite a good understanding of Ecological Dynamics, there was still so much to take from this chapter. It’s something everyone should go back over every so often to affirm their understanding of some of the key concepts

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Think more about how the environment and the athlete are interacting. Use things like video analysis to help you understand
• How are the players exploiting the physical and informational constraints during practice. Sometimes I tend to put pay more attention to physical
• All constraints are interacting and having an influence on each other. The timescales constraints act on is important to look out for
• Make sure that the variability had a purpose. Can you purposeful variability to guide athletes into metastable regions
• Intentional constraints are the most important constraint and the first one we should focus on
• Think more about what stage of learning the player may be at. This then will guide how you are using different principles of practice design
• Put a bit more thought into how you are manipulating certain constraints. What am I specifically trying to do
• Make sure you are taking into account all the different elements of RLD
• Good practice design is practice that is beneficial for specific athlete(s) in a specific context at a specific time
• Do more task analysis to see what the main constraints are

🥇Top Quotes

 💡 Successful performers are able to adapt their actions to dynamically shifting environments that characterize competitive sport

 💡 For each learner, the task in sport is to exploit physical and informational constraints to stabilize an intended behaviour

 💡 A non-linear pedagogical approach provides a principled, theoretical framework for understanding individuality and applying the ideas in learning design

 💡 For each learner, the task in sport is to exploit physical (i.e. mechanical) and informational (i.e. patterns in the distribution of stimulus energy) constraints to stabilize an intended behaviour

 💡 The ‘search and assemble’ process that characterizes learning in each individual can be enhanced by system variability, which amplifies exploratory activity and guides discovery of individualized functional solutions (Newell, Liu & Mayer-Kress, 2008; Schöllhorn, Mayer-Kress, Newell & Michelbrink, 2009)

 💡 Intentional constraints shape perception–action couplings. In certain situations, particular perceptions and actions are more functional than others and, with experience, learners get better at choosing the perceptions and actions they can use to achieve task goals

 💡 System degeneracy, or the ability of elements that are structurally different to perform a similar function or yield a similar output, is an essential feature of skilled behaviour. It enhances the flexibility of athletes in competitive performance environments (Davids, Button, Araújo, Renshaw & Hristovski, 2006)

 💡 In summary, intentions, perceptions and actions are intertwined processes that benefit from the education of intention, attunement to key perceptual variables in the performance environment and calibration as the system changes as a result of processes such as development and maturation

 💡 Representative learning design is a new term which theoretically captures how motor learning theorists and pedagogues might use insights from ecological dynamics, such as perception–action coupling, emergence under constraints, self-organization, task simplification, movement pattern variability and neurobiological system degeneracy, to ensure that practice and training task constraints are representative of the context towards which they are intended to generalize (Pinder et al., 2011).

 💡 There is no general ‘optimal organization’ for designing practices. The organization of training practices that are useful (i.e. to develop sport expertise) is that which is relevant to improve performance of a specific individual athlete, or groups of athletes, in a certain context learning a certain task (Davids, Button & Bennett, 2008).

 💡 The key to assisting learners in acquiring functional movement behaviours comes about through presenting the relevant constraints during the different phases of skill development