Paul Godbout

Tactical Knowledge in Team Sports From a Constructivist and Cognitivist Perspective

Traditionally, teaching team sports has been based on a strategy that puts forward the mastery of motor skills prior to actual involvement in the game, thus emphasizing physical capacities more than an understanding of the game. Supporting a constmctivist and a cognitivist perspective to the teaching—learning process, this paper focuses on tactical knowledge constructed by the students. In order to shed light on the nature of tactical knowledge envisioned for the students, the systemic and therefore dynamic view of team sports is presented. Categories of knowledge are thereafter illustrated, and three main steps that students go through to construct and stabilize their tactical knowledge are identified. Finally, some similarities and differences between the constructivist and cognitivist perspective presented in this paper and the knowledge-based literature on motor expertise are discussed.

Students' Precision and Interobserver Reliability of Performance Assessment in Team Sports

French sport pedagogy researchers have recently developed a team sport assessment procedure (TSAP; Crehaigne, Godbout & Bouthier, 1997). Its primary objective is to provide teachers with objective data on students offensive performance in different invasion and net games while avoiding standardized tests which do not provide for a rapport ofstrength. According to Crehaigne et al. (1997), the rapport of strength is a central notion in team sports; it refers to the opposition relationship or the antagonist link existing between several players or groups of players confronted by virtue ofcertain rules of a game that determine a pattern of interaction (p. 516). Based on the two basic notions of: How a player gains possession of the ball (two variables), and How a player disposes of the ball (four variables) a players specific behaviors are observed and noted during game play (see Table 1). The collected data are then summarized and a performance score is calculated from two different indexes: the volume of play and the efficiency index (Grehaigne et al., 1997). Although it is impossible to determine whether the results specifically reflect the technical aspect of performance, the tactical aspect, or both (which may be the case in most situations), the in-