Three Stages of Motor Learning At this point in the chapter, you might ask, “What does all this discussion about thinking and memory have to do with motor learning and performance?” You want your athletes to respond, not think. You want them to grip it and rip it. You want them to look and automatically react. Well, motor learning, particularly early learning, involves attempts by learners to acquire an idea of the movement (Gentile, 1972) or understand the basic pattern of coordination (Newell, 1985). To achieve these goals, learners must use cognitive (Fitts & Posner, 1967) and verbal processes (Adams, 1971) to solve problems. To this end, Fitts (1964; Fitts & Posner, 1967) suggests that motor skill acquisition follows three stages: the cognitive stage, the associative stage, and the autonomous stage.
For the new learner, the problem to be solved in the cognitive stage is understanding what to do (Schmidt & Lee, 2005). It would be extremely difficult for someone to learn a skill without receiving any prior knowledge about the skill, whether that knowledge is visual or verbal. For example, consider the butterfly stroke in swimming. It is a fairly complicated and somewhat unnatural stroke in which to syncopate the movement of the arms with the kick of the legs. It would be difficult indeed for a novice swimmer to learn such a stroke without ever seeing the stroke performed or ever receiving any declarative knowledge about how the stroke is performed. In other words, motor learning begins with the cognitive stage and the processing of information.
The associative stage is characterized as much less verbal information, smaller gains in performance, conscious performance, adjustment making, awkward and disjointed movement, and taking a long time to complete. During this stage the athlete works at making movement adjustments and stringing together small movement skills. This stage is also called the motor stage (Adams, 1971) because the problem to be solved in the associative stage is learning how to perform the skill (Schmidt & Lee, 2005). From the cognitive perspective, the athlete is attempting to translate declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge. In other words, the athlete is transforming what to do into how to do.
According to Fitts' and Posner's paradigm, this is the final stage of motor acquisition. It often requires years of training to arrive at the autonomous stage. But this stage is where it's at for elite athletes, where motor performance becomes largely automatic, where cognitive processing demands are minimal, and athletes are capable of attending to and processing other information, such as the position of defensive players, game strategy, or the form or style of movement (Schmidt & Lee, 2005) in sports such as ice-skating, dance, and synchronized swimming. It is the stage where they can now respond and not think (or think minimally), where they can grip it and rip it, look and automatically react, and enter a state of flow.
Provide your athletes with detailed information in the early stage of learning. If you want your athletes to perform correctly, give them the correct information. This means that you need to know what you are talking about and you need to be clear and concise with your instruction. If your athletes don't understand what they are supposed to do, they won't do it correctly. And if they don't understand, perhaps the problem is you, not them. In other words, you may need to do a better job of clearly communicating exactly what you want them to do and communicate it in laymen's terms—in language they can understand and at a conceptual level they are prepared to cognitively grasp. For example, you may understand the physics behind what you are teaching, but if your athletes don't comprehend concepts such as angular momentum, shear force, and action-reaction you will have lost them at “Hello.”
Read more from Applying Educational Psychology in Coaching Athletes by Jeffery Huber. |