Motor skill learning and adaptability in primary school children (2022)

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. 

Nederlandstalige samenvatting:
Onderzocht is hoe de motorische vaardigheden van basisschoolkinderen kunnen worden verbeterd en gecontroleerd, niet alleen in termen van prestatie, maar ook in termen van aanpassingsvermogen. Vanuit het perspectief van de constraint-led-approach, is onderzocht of het manipuleren van taak-constraints leidt tot verbetering van het motorisch leren bij kinderen en kan worden gebruikt om het aanpassingsvermogen te beoordelen. 

Dit werd gedaan door prescriptieve oplossingen te minimaliseren en variabiliteit tijdens het oefenen te stimuleren. Er werd aangetoond dat het minimaliseren van prescriptieve oplossingen leidde tot een verbetering in motorisch leren, en dat dit onafhankelijk was van individuele verschillen zoals leeftijd en verbaal werkgeheugen. Aangetoond is dat de prestaties van kinderen kunnen worden verbeterd door te trainen met aangepaste materialen die een meer variabele bewegingsuitvoering afdwingen. Daarnaast suggereerden de bevindingen ook dat het manipuleren van taak-constraints kunnen worden ingeroepen om het aanpassingsvermogen te beoordelen.

Engelstalige samenvatting:
This thesis aimed to advance our understanding of motor learning and adaptability in primary school children aged 8-12 years. The present series of studies asked how primary school children’s motor skill can be enhanced and monitored, not only in terms of performance levels but also in terms of adaptability in motor performance. Starting point for this dissertation was the manipulation of task constraints to induce variability during practice, which would allow learners to search for individual solutions.

From the perspective of the constraints-led-approach, in this thesis two main questions about manipulating task constraints are studied. First, as providing instructions can be considered a task constraint, should educators aim for minimizing instructing prescriptive solutions as much as possible, thus allowing children more freely to explore to enhance motor learning? Secondly, should educators of young children deliberately stimulate variability through manipulation of the constraints, so that the learner must search for adaptive solutions? 

This thesis also explored how manipulating task constraints can help monitoring motor skills and stability and adaptability in children’s motor performance. It was shown that minimizing prescribed solutions led to an improved motor learning, and that this was -under the constraints used here- independent of individual differences such as age and verbal working memory capacity. Also, we demonstrated that performance of children can be improved by training with modified equipment that enforces more variable movement execution. Next to that, our findings also suggested that manipulation task constraints may be invoked to monitor adaptability. This thesis has important ramifications for practitioners, especially for (youth) coaches and teachers working in sports and physical education.