CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

1. Sport psychology and its characterization 4

2. Skill acquisition and expertise 4

3. Superability 6

4. Stages of skill acquisition 8

5. The information-processing approach to skills 10

6. Memory 11

7. Theories of motor learning 12

8. Expert performance 14

9. Enhancing skill and expertise: the role of practice 15

CONCLUSION 18

GLOSSARY

LITERATURE

АННОТАЦИЯ

Introduction

The role of sports psychology in modern sport increases every year. It is difficult to imagine the work of a sports club without sports psychologist, not to mention the national team. Individual national Olympic teams have psychologists in state for each kind of sport. Researches examining athletes psychological empowerment are conducted actively. It is fundamentally important to the future of sport what will be the condition of children's sports psychology. Today the great attention is paid to the selection and testing of athletes, as well as to their competent education at different ages and in the training process. The work with an athlete who has decided to leave big sport should be considered as special and the most important area of sports psychology. How to help someone to do it competently and that he could start a new life out of the big sport.

In sports, a person commits all kinds of movement, developing physical qualities, performs various technical and tactical methods that will not be complete without a co-development of mental processes and special psychological training. Psychology is directly related to the position and movement of our bodies, with our coordination, with the quality of movement execution. For example, emotions allow to strengthen our movements, visualization allows to form a coordination bond between the physical and the mental, etc.

The topic is actual because it reveals the mechanism of development of various skills and abilities from the point of view of psychology which would allow to build a sports training more completely and scientifically.

The purpose of this work is to clarify the character of skills in sport as well as their relationship to psychology.

The main tasks of the work are to determine sports psychology, to make the connection and show the importance of psychology in the acquisition of skills and abilities, to distinguish between skills and abilities, to understand the differences between expert and novice performers, to form an understanding of the impact of sport experience to practice.

1 The acquisition of skills and experience in sport in terms of sports psychology

Because there are many ways in which psychology can be applied to sport and, given the wide range of activities that different cultures regard as sport, it is helpful to adopt quite a broad definition of sport psychology. In 1996, the European Federation of Sport Psychology (FEPSAC) produced such a broad definition, which, slightly simplified, reads, “Sport psychology is the study of the psychological basis, processes and effects of sport”[1, p.168]. This of course begs the questions, what is sport and what is psychology? Although many athletes would insist that sport necessarily includes an element of competition, the term “sport” is used, both in the FEPSAC definition of sport psychology, in the broadest sense, including any physical activity for the purposes of competition, recreation, education or health. Psychology is often defined as “the science of mind and behaviour’’ [1, p. 169].

Sport psychology (or sports psychology) is thus a broad church. Many American sport psychologists draw a sharp distinction between academic sport psychology, which focuses on all the factors affecting participation and performance in sport, and applied sport psychology, which focuses purely on applying psychology to enhance athletic performance [1].

As a man learn a sport, at whatever level, he develops existing and new skills. Each sport requires a different range of skills. Thinking more generally, a man have a set of basic physical abilities, including speed and strength, which underlie his skills.

A widely accepted definition of a skill comes from B. Knapp. A skill is “the learned ability to bring about pre-determined results with maximum certainty, often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both’’[1, p. 169]. Developing a sporting skill, sportsmen are aiming to combine speed, power, accuracy and economy of movement, whilst also minimising possibility of a catastrophic error. The trick in fulfilling one’s potential level of skill is to achieve these ideals simultaneously. The technique of a tennis serve can be considered as an example. If novices or even moderately skilled players serve with all the speed and power they can muster, the chances are high that they will waste a lot of energy and land the ball outside the target area.

An ability, by contrast, describes the physical attributes that affect a sportsman’s potential for a given sport. Abilities are important because they put limits on the degree of skill one can acquire in a given sport. If somebody wishes to become an elite athlete, it is also a good idea to match up his abilities with an appropriate sport. If, for example, a sportsman’s upper body strength and aerobic fitness are excellent but he has poor manual dexterity and spatial awareness, he may be better suited to rugby than snooker.

E. Fleishman has provided a way of looking at abilities, distinguishing between two types of motor abilities such as gross motor abilities and psychomotor abilities. Gross motor abilities are physical as speed, strength, stamina and flexibility. Psychomotor abilities involve perception as well as physical attributes. An example of a psychomotor ability is reaction time, which requires one to perceive a stimulus, initiate the appropriate response and carry out the motor response. All sports require a blend of gross motor abilities and psychomotor abilities, but some sports have a particular requirement for particular abilities. Dynamic strength is particularly important for a weightlifter; psychomotor abilities less so. The idea that a set of innate abilities underlies sporting skills has many useful applications, such as choosing the sports in which one might find it easiest to compete seriously. It is also certainly true to say that having certain abilities makes it easier to acquire certain skills. Regular weight training does not merely increase a sportsman’s lifting skills (although it does so), but it also increases his dynamic strength, which in turn allows him to develop further his skills of tackling. In this case, the motor ability is certainly not fixed unchangeable, but can in fact be enhanced by hard training [2].

A number of systems for classifying motor skills have been developed in psychology: gross and fine skills, open and closed skills, discrete, continuous and serial skills, external and internally paced skills.

Gross and fine skills. The fineness of a motor skill is defined as how much precision is required in the movement. Gross skills are those which require large muscular movement. For example, the major skill involved in the high is an upward thrust by the leg muscles. Fine skills require tiny muscular movements, such as are required for an elite standard gymnastic performance.

Open and closed skills. A motor skill can be defined as closed by how predictable and unchanging the environment is in which it is performed. It is related to sports where a sportsman is facing an opponent. One of the major obstacles a sportsman has to overcome is that he doesn’t know what is coming next. Would, for example, his opponent circle or attack; punch high or low, straight or round house? Dealing with this involves responding to his opponent’s plan of attack whilst formulating and implementing his own at the same time. The skills needed to achieve these goals are open [2].

Training for open skills may involve using open and closed scenarios. Closed training scenarios are particularly useful when very complex motor skills need to be learnt – they would simply be too difficult to learn in an open situation. The martial arts provide a good example of closed training techniques that can be helpful in preparation for open situations. Typically, training involves unvarying sequences of moves, called kata or forms according to the style. Kata involve entirely closed skills, because the karateka knows precisely what is coming next. However, practitioners of the martial arts involving kata believe that this approach to skill acquisition helps them greatly in open situations [2].

Discrete, continuous and serial skills. This distinction between these skills is based on the extent to which there are clear beginning and end points to a movement. In any kind of sports, one probably has to use some discrete skills and some continuous skills. Discrete skills involve brief actions that have a clear beginning and end. Examples of discrete skills include a goalkeeper’s dive, a fielder’s throw and a rugby player’s drop kick. Continuous skills are defined as those that do not have discrete beginnings and ends. They may thus be stopped at any point without the movement’s being left incomplete. Examples of continuous skills include running and cycling. Of course, much of the time is needed to perform a series of different movements in sequence. These skills do not fall neatly into the categories of either discrete or continuous skills. Such skills are classified as a third category, called serial skills. Serial skills in sport include gymnastic routines and combination punches.

External and internally paced skills. A further system for classifying skills is founded upon the extent to which the timing of the movement is under the control of an athlete. Movements which are largely under an athlete’s control are known as internally paced movements. The more an athlete’s timing is determined by external events, the more externally paced the skill is said to be. A good example of a skill that is highly internally paced is the bowl. The bowler is not constrained by anything else happening on the pitch and has the freedom to choose the pace of the ball. The batsman, by contrast, has to respond to the pace dictated by the bowler. Batting is thus a more externally paced skill [1].