Luc Reid

The relationship between expertise and self-regulation in movement performance some theoretical issues

Although self-regulation has been advanced as a construct in sport psychology, little attention has been paid to the relationship between motor expertise and the actual self-regulation of a motor task. The present text examines the theoretical notions of self-regulation (on-line supervision and control), expertise, and performance, in the light of certain particularities implicated in motor skills, such as the nature of practical and conceptual knowledge and the relationship between them.

Young Children's Difficulty with Ambiguous Messages: Guessing Strategy or Comprehension Monitoring Deficiency?

Abstract This research examined two hypotheses that have been proposed to explain young childrens difficulty in detecting ambiguous messages: the comprehension monitoring deficiency hypothesis and the guessing strategy hypothesis. Sixty-four children (mean age, 6 years, 5 months) were assigned to an informed group whose members had been shown the inadequacy of the guessing strategy or to a noninformed group. All children acted as listeners for 16 trials (8 with informative messages and 8 with ambiguous ones). They were asked to select the referent out of three pictures or to pick a card displaying the letter X if the message did not enable them to distinguish the referent. They were also instructed to indicate their confidence in their choices. Neither of the two hypotheses was fully supported. Informed children were not more adequate in their listening behaviors than noninformed children, and all displayed some ability in monitoring their comprehension, as shown by their greater certainty and their less...

Generalization of Training Speaking Skills: The Role of Overt Activity, Feedback, and Child's Initial Level of Competence

72 children (mean age = 6–5) were assigned to 1 of 6 training conditions for speaking skills in a 2 (with or without feedback) × 3 (degree of overt activity) crossed design. Children in the active condition participated directly in three training exercises; each child in the passive condition observed the performance of the child in the active condition to whom he was matched; children in the active-passive condition received a combination of the two previous treatments. Children were given a pretest and immediate and delayed posttests, each of which was comprised of five tasks, four of which aimed at measuring possible transfer to other referential communication behaviors. Posttest evaluations showed that improvements in speaking behavior were related to the feedback condition, but not to the childs initial level of competence as assessed by global performance on the five pretest tasks. The reverse was true for the four transfer tasks. The amount of overt activity did not exert a significant effect on childrens performance of any of the five tasks. Possible causes of the difficulty of obtaining transfer in training experiments are discussed.