An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Skill Acquisition: Implications for Development of Talent in Sport

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 An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Skill Acquisition: Implications for Development of Talent in Sport


                                                        Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

These are my detailed notes that go through each section of the paper. I try my best to make it as reader friendly as possible.

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

  1. The article starts by giving a nice overview of Ecological Dynamics and the underpinning principles
  2. The article then explores Representative Learning Design and why it’s crucial for practice design and talent evaluation
  3. Gives a principled approach to designing Talent Evaluation Tests from an Ecological Dynamics point of view.

🤝Impressions

This is a great paper and there’s lots to take away from it. There is so much going wrong with current Talent Pathways. The Framework for designing evaluation tests could also be used by coaches to design meaningful practice tasks.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

  • “Key aspects of expert performance in sport: attunement to affordances, harnessing neurobiological system degeneracy, and exploiting metastability during learning” (Davids et.al, 2015)
  • Degeneracy and why it’s important for coaches to understand
  • Focus on developing the ability achieve consistent outcomes in different ways
  • Affordance based control is a nice way to look at how skilled behaviour emerges
  • When working with children you need to be aware that their action capabilities and body dimensions are changing quickly
  • Setting the intentional goal is crucial because this will determine how performers should act if they want to achieve a particular outcome
  • Perception and Action sub-systems are so tightly bound that merely adopting an intention can influence the way that you perceive the information in the environment
  • To achieve representative learning design the information variables from the performance environment need to be sampled so that the learners can functionally couple perception-action processes when looking to achieve task goals in practice
  • Good evaluation tests are based on the principles of good practice design and visa versa

🥇Top Quotes

💡 These ideas from ecological dynamics propose that, as expertise in sport is enhanced, informational constraints designed into practice tasks can progressively direct an individual to the specifying information sources that support the organisation of actions and enhance the capacity to adapt to changes in a performance environment 

💡 Expertise can be defined as the individual’s capacity to functionally interact with key constraints (i.e., task and environmental; Newell, 1986) in order to exploit them to successfully achieve performance aims. 

 💡 From the developing athlete’s viewpoint, the task is to become expert at exploiting physical and informational constraints to stabilize intended performance outcomes. 

💡 Developing a rationale for identifying and manipulating the major constraints on learners provides a principled basis for the design of performance evaluation tests in talent programmes (Vilar et al., 2012)

💡 In ecological dynamics the goal of learners is not to re-produce an idealized movement pattern, but to assemble a personal, functional, ‘optimal’ movement solution which satisfies the unique configuration of constraints impinging upon them at any instant in time (Chow et al., 2011).

💡 Affordances are perceived in relation to relevant properties of an individual including the scale of key body dimensions (e.g., limb sizes), or action capabilities (e.g., speed, strength). These ideas have important implications for those working with developing athletes whose body dimensions and action capabilities are changing as they go through growth spurts, for example during adolescence 

💡 Indeed, so intimately bound are perception and action sub- systems, that it has been shown that merely adopting an intention to act in a certain way (for example to catch a ball with one hand) can influence how perceptual processes are implemented to achieve an action, regardless of whether the action is correctly executed or not (Cañal-Bruland & van der Kamp, 2009).


Here's a link to the full paper

https://eprints.qut.edu.au/219712/1/63711.pdf


Reference for paper

Davids, K., Araújo, D., Vilar, L., Renshaw, I., & Pinder, R. (2013). An ecological dynamics approach to skill acquisition: Implications for development of talent in sport. Talent Development and Excellence , 5(1), 21-34.

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