Modeling and the Acquisition of an Athletic Skill — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

Modeling and the Acquisition of an Athletic Skill

Name: Anderson Boatman
Major: Psychology
Hometown: Poplar Grove, IL
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Senior thesis

Abstract

How do people learn skills, more specifically athletic skills? Looking closely at Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, one can find the answer provided by observational learning. This study aimed to identify if contextual differences of an expert model had an effect on the acquisition of an athletic skill of shooting a free-throw. A review of the relevant literature was conducted to determine if modeling was an effective form of learning skills, including athletic skills. Lack of research into differences of context was the basis for the experiment that followed. The experiment looked at 34 (16 male. 18 female) students at Carthage College in learning athletic skills. A baseline was conducted to determine the average number of free-throws the participants could successfully make out of twenty. The participant then either watched a live or a video expert model demonstrate proper free-throw shooting technique. The results of this experiment indicated that context did not appear to affect the ability to learn how to shoot a free-throw, but the results and previous research raise questions about the duration of time learning from a model, as a factor, to acquire athletic skills.

Poster file